HeyJaredTim Powers on writing fantasy
My thoughts on writing fantasy stories -- what they're made of and how they're made.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 11
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- Sep 28, 2026
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- Jul 24, 2026
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A Note On Translations (opens the original)
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Many of my books have been published in translation in other countries, and. I always leaf through copies of these, wondering how good the translations are. With most of them I can at best recognize a word here and there, but with languages like Japanese and Hebrew I can’t even do that. I just admire the covers.Sometimes I am able to translate bits, or have a friend do it, and sometimes I’m left wondering what foreign readers made of the books, or of their author.Tim Powers on writ
Media Tie-Ins (opens the original)
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If you get a few novels published by the traditional publishers, you might very well be offered the opportunity to write a media tie-in – a book set in the world of some movie or TV series or video game.I was once approached to do one. It was to be a prequel to a book that was being made into a big-budget movie, but Algis Budrys told me, “You don’t want to do it.”Tim Powers on writing fantasy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new po
Deviations in Deviant’s Palace (opens the original)
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A reviewer at The Washington Post dismissed my book Dinner At Deviant’s Palace as what James Blish used to call a “baby picture”: an early book that’s been roundly rejected, but is dusted off and accepted after a later book has been published and done well. This does happen, and a lot of writers’ second or third novels are actually ones they wrote before their “first.” The writer is naturally pleased to finally land that old effort, but I imagine it can be kind of embarrassing when reviewers and
The Gestalt -- Collaboration (opens the original)
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When Jim Blaylock and I were students at Cal State Fullerton in 1972, the school paper sometimes published poetry. It was terrible stuff, all free verse rainbows and flowers and children playing on beaches, as I recall, and one idle afternoon we decided that we could write stuff that looked like poetry but was just gibberish, and see if the paper would print it.So we got a blank piece of paper, and one of us wrote a line at the top and passed it to the other guy, who wrote a following line and p
More Personal Publishing Adventures (opens the original)
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Even before Laser Books published my first book in 1976, I had completed another for them, titled An Epitaph in Rust. As with the previous book, the copy-editor changed dialogue and added bits – I recall that at one point a dog was described, for no imaginable reason, as having a bullet-proof dog sweater -- but this time, even though I restored my original text in the copy-edited manuscript and then again in the proofs, nearly all of the editor’s revisions got through, and appeared in the publis
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