This is the story of my love for Tad Williams. And of why I will buy every book he releases, forever, and tell people why they should read his books, and generally act like a Tad Williams televangelist. And of why being human is the best possible thing you can be as an author.
Waaay, way back, in the 90s, I worked in bookstore. (Shocker, I know.) It was an odd sort of place, an Italian-owned chain called Rizzoli’s. We mostly sold expensive coffee table books of art and architecture, and did a surprisingly brisk trade in the Italian newspapers Corriera della Sera and La Repubblica too. Fiction was relegated to a back corner of the store. Genre fiction? Forget about it. I was an assistant manager for a while, running the Music Department, huddled in a small balcony area in the back of the store. I sold a lot of classical and jazz and European pop music. There was no American rock or pop in stock. We weren’t that kind of place. The store was located on the fourth floor of the Water Tower Place, a high end shopping mall on Michigan Avenue [more…]