Ten Questions for Daniel Abraham
Daniel Abraham and I met at the Millenium PhilCon, my first ever WorldCon. I noted that he had “Albuquerque, New Mexico” under his name on his badge, so I let him know that I was from Los Alamos, and then a few caffeine fueled day/night cycles later, I found myself invited to join his writers group. I’m very glad I did. Like me, Daniel is a Clarion West graduate, though we attended different years. He is the only person, that I know of, who has had his wedding picture in Locus with a toilet prominently displayed in the foreground. That was a gift from said writers group.
I still remember the email Daniel sent when he landed his first novel deal, a four book series with Tor. I was there when he workshopped his first Jayne Heller book, for which he adopted the pen name MLN Hanover, and I was the person he and Ty Franck, the other half of the duo who writes as James SA Corey, knew in common. Ty came to New Mexico for a visit and inevitably met the rest of the writers group, which he would later join.
In the following email interview, I got a chance to catch up with Daniel and revisit some of the stories he’s told me over the years.
An Interview with Daniel Abraham, aka M.L.N. Hanover, aka James S.A. Corey
Conducted and Edited by Emily Mah, November, 2011
Emily Mah: I always think of the story of how you became a writer as beginning pre-natally, when your mother dreamed of you becoming an architect. Care to share what followed from this?
Daniel Abraham: Well the short form of the story is that my mother wanted to be an architect from the time that she was 12, only this was the 60s. When she got pregnant with yours truly, her first thought was “Oh well, maybe I’ll have a son and he’ll be an architect.” Her second thought was something like “Ohmigod, did I just think that?” What followed from that was that I spent my gentle formative years with my Spanish-fluent hippie English major father while my mother got her architectural degree. He read to me a lot all through my childhood, and apparently some of it stuck.
Three years ago this week I posted my fist official article on the new Black Gate blog. I was one the original seven bloggers who answered John O’Neill’s call to make Black Gate online a place people wanted to visit again and again.
If you read a lot, you’ll soon find yourself drawn to writers who become personal favourites but who, unaccountably, go unrecognised by the wider world. A little while ago my girlfriend introduced me to a book by one of her own favourite writers, a woman named Joan North. I want to write about North here, because I was impressed by her work and I think she deserves to be better known.
