Paul S. Kemp: I suppose the textbook definition of an anti-hero is pre...

Cale is my signature character in the Forgotten Realms. The most popular character I've written. He's a thief, an assassin, and eventually, a priest who stabs his own god in the chest. Always trying to slip his past, but never succeeding. Dark dude. Brooding dude. Born killer. But honorable, still.

Paul S. Kemp

dark character past

I like to keep the world, to some degree, an implied setting.

Paul S. Kemp

implied degrees world

My favorite new character isn't new, but more fleshed out - Gadd, the alekeep at the Tunnel. He's got him some teeth and tats. His history is hinted at in Discourse, and I plan to explore it more in later books.

Paul S. Kemp

tunnels character book

I enjoyed The Mirage by M. Ruff. I'm reading Edgar Rice Burrough's Princess Of Mars right and loving it.

Paul S. Kemp

mirages princess reading

I loved The Weird (one of the stories in it inspired Blackalley in Discourse).

Paul S. Kemp

discourse inspired stories

Original work has no floor and no ceiling. You can reach essentially zero readers or millions.

Paul S. Kemp

ceilings zero reader

Shared world has done some world building and brings (in the case of FR and SW) a big audience. With your own work, you're more creatively free. In a way, the shared world stuff has a high floor but a ceiling.

Paul S. Kemp

ceilings done world

I try to pester Christian Dunn from time to time. As soon as my schedule allows, I plan to make a real pest of myself and get some hot, slippery Chaos action.

Paul S. Kemp

real christian trying

The Disney deal created some wrinkles. I'm under contract. But I'm on standby.

Paul S. Kemp

wrinkles deals contracts

I'm unstuck in time. Also, I juggle like mad and have made myself efficient.

Paul S. Kemp

efficient mad made

Fantasy allows for less rigorous worldbuilding and more vigorous exploration of moral questions. Sci-fi is opp.

Paul S. Kemp

exploration fantasy moral

The Forgotten Realms is arguable the most detailed, intricate fantasy setting ever created this side of Middle Earth. It's a setting for many D&D game products and lots of fiction. It is vast, historically and geographically and so contains just about anything you might imagine, at one place or time or another. Created by Ed Greenwood. And, for the record, Ed Greenwood is one of the smartest guys I've ever met.

Paul S. Kemp

guy games fiction

The Sundering is a world spanning event that creates ripples all across the Realms. The books in the series are connected in that they take place against that backdrop, showing different aspects of it. The stories, however, are not sequels or intertwined, though there are some Easter Eggs across books.

Paul S. Kemp

eggs easter book

My goal is to write stories that are connected, but not sequels in any meaningful sense. Like Howard's Conan tales or Leiber's Fahrrd & the Great Mauser stories.

Paul S. Kemp

goal writing meaningful

I always work from outline and almost always write out of sequence. It just works for me.

Paul S. Kemp

sequence outlines writing

With young kids (I have four including the newborn) times passes weirdly for me.

Paul S. Kemp

newborn four kids

[Writing] is harder than you think. You'll be rejected often. If you do it for money, you'll quit. Love it or don't do it.

Paul S. Kemp

quitting writing thinking

I always say that characters must drive plots, never the reverse. Writing about large-scale events creates the risk that the scope of the events themselves can overwhelm the characters. I emphatically do not want that. That was the only trepidation I felt when I started 'The Twilight War.'

Paul S. Kemp

drive never writing war

My favorite class as an undergraduate was a political theory class on justice. Now, 'justice' is hardly a self-defining term, and much smarter men than I have developed various definitions over the centuries. The class put Plato at one end and Nietzsche at the other, and off we went.

Paul S. Kemp

end political justice men

The anti-hero walks the morally gray path and constantly flirts with redemption, and that flirtation is just a blast to write.

Paul S. Kemp

just gray redemption path

I suppose the textbook definition of an anti-hero is pretty straightforward - a protagonist who embodies not only heroic characteristics but also some characteristics typically deemed non-heroic, even villainous.