DAVID ZINDELL

When I was a boy, I thought I had no interest in writing.  I was the math guy, the kind of geek who liked to extract square roots just for the fun of it.  I wanted to do brain surgery, find the Abominable Snowman and climb Mount Everest - all on the same day.

I also loved to read.  Book after book, year after year, completely
unknown to me, the desire to write sparked to life inside me and gradually grew into a flame.  One day, after I finished a science fiction book I call NAN - the Nameless Awful Novel - the flame suddenly flared as hot as a little sun because I decided that I could write something better.

I tried to.  I immediately sat down and wrote a novel, The Last
Brotherhood, which lies packed away inside a drawer.  Although I think it must have been better than NAN, it wasn't very good.  I discovered that writing the good stuff is hard. I spent more years trying to do that.  I worked as a bartender at night to be able to have the time to write during the day.  I wrote and I wrote.  Then I wrote a story, Shanidar, which won first prize in the Writer's Of The Future contest.  One of the contest judges, Robert Silverberg, was editing a new line of books in addition to writing great stories himself.  He called me out of the blue to see if I might be interested in doing a novel set in my Shanidar far future universe.  It was like God calling.  I immediately said yes. The resulting novel, Neverness, sold in England for what my publishers cited as a record advance for a first science fiction novel.  They also said that I might possibly be the next Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov. I just wanted to be David Zindell.  I couldn't quite believe it when Neverness edged out the work of big writers such as Dean Koontz on the British bestseller list.  I felt flattered when Neverness was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and I was nominated for the John C. Campbell Award for best new writer of the year.  A couple of years later, my second novel, The Broken God, was also put up for the Arthur C. Clarke Award.  Although  I didn't win any of these, I came away with the I Get
To Keep On Writing Award.  And that has been the absolutely best award of all. I followed up my first two novels with The Wild and War In Heaven, which completed my Requiem For Homo Sapiens series.  Then I wrote the four novels of the EaCycle: The Lightstone; Lord Of Lies; Blade Jade; The Diamond Warriors.  In working in this new genre of fantasy, I rediscovered an old, old love. Recently, I have finished two very different (for me) books.  The Eros Project is a very hot, very wild contemporary love story set in Boulder, Colorado.  And Splendor is a love story of another sort: it's an account of my quest to find an elusive quality I call splendor.  Among other things, it's about my love of life and why I became a writer.  For writing, as it turned out, is what I feel I was born to do after all.