Below is an interview with R. A. Salvatore, many thanks to him personally and on behalf of the wotmania community for taking the time to answer all these questions so thorougly. I thought about getting into a big introduction to this interview or having something important to say... But then I realized it's late at night, I'm tired, and I should just let the interview speak for itself... Enjoy, it's a great one! :D

Could you maybe tell us a little about yourself, like how you got into the writing business to begin with, what inspired you to write fantasy, and maybe what you're working on at the moment?

I’m a working-class kid from a blue-collar New England family. My Dad worked for the Post Office and ran a small furniture business on the side. I was the youngest of seven (with five older sisters!), and so, out of simple necessity, I learned early on that I had to work hard for anything I wanted. It was a good lesson.

When I was very young, kindergarten and even pre-k, I was an avid reader and writer. I have an amazing collection of Charles Shultz’s “Peanuts” books, circa 1960's. It’s funny, but the older I get, the more convinced I am that Shultz got so many things exactly right. I would stay home from school often (I had an agreement with my Mom that I could, as long as I got good grades), huddled in my room with these and other books. I wrote books, too, most featuring new adventures with Snoopy.

I loved the world of imagination. I loved to read and to write, but then something happened. As I made my way through school, I kept getting handed books to read that didn’t excite me and didn’t even remotely connect to the realities of my life. “Silas Marner” or “Ethan Fromme” might be great works (I wouldn’t know, as I cannot bring myself to even crack either open), but to a 9th-grader, reading them was nothing more than tiresome work.

It got so bad that by the time I was graduated, the only reading I did was in order to get the grade and the only writing I did was in order to get the grade. I can remember exactly two pieces I wrote in high school that involved any sort of effort: a description of a swamp and a short story which was loosely inspired by “The Day of the Triffids” movie. That short story would become my first manuscript six-to-seven years later.

I started college as a Math/Computer Science major during the infancy of the computer revolution. That first year, 1977, my sister handed me a copy of the white boxed set of the four Tolkien books, “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. I still remember the look on her face when I asked her what they were about - remember, this was 1977 and there was no “fantasy” genre. The bookstores had maybe three shelves in one bay for “science-fiction” and the fantasy books (meaning Tolkien and the first Terry Brooks’ novel, usually) took up about a fifth of one shelf, if that.