Ask the Author: Geoffrey E. Fox
Answered Questions (9)
Geoffrey E. Fox
Thanks for asking, Margaret. I haven't yet read A Distant Mirror, thanks for the suggestion. My great interest in the Turk-Christian relations in the 14th and especially 15th centuries (my story takes place in 1402, the taking of Constantinople by Mehmet II in 1453) was in the wide area of collaboration between two supposedly irreconcilable ideologies. Lots of trade and political compromises between them, and very frequently their warriors would be fighting on the same side. Real life is always more complicated than ideology.
Geoffrey E. Fox
I'm currently reading Roberto Bolaño, 2666.
Geoffrey E. Fox
I do that all the time. Currently I'm wandering through eastern Czechoslovakia with Josef Švejk, trying to avoid getting killed in the Great War.
Geoffrey E. Fox
This actually is the plot for my current novel: how and why does a young man get caught up wholeheartedly in a violent, dangerous movement promising to change the world? And what all happens then? I was such a young man. The novel is a way of trying to understand it.
Geoffrey E. Fox
It's good to listen to tips from any experienced writer, but nobody can tell you how to write, because nobody else writes from your brain. So you have to take all advice, but take it skeptically.
Geoffrey E. Fox
The only way: sit down and get to work. One trick that helps me when I'm stuck is to create a separate file, where I permit myself to write any damned thing that comes into my head, including why I think I'm having so much trouble with this section of my work. I do that until, among all the gibberish, I discover the source of the problem and a solution.
Geoffrey E. Fox
You never get bored.
Geoffrey E. Fox
For "A Gift for the Sultan," the idea came on a visit to Istanbul, where I bcame aware of the complex interactions of the Christian Orthodox, Greek-speaking population of ancient Constantinople and the newly Islamized Turks who besieged the city.
Geoffrey E. Fox
Current novel is "The Bookbinder," about the aspirations and accomplishments of those who fought for the Paris Commune and about those who did everything they could to destroy it — and did, physically, though the aspirations they tried to erase continue to our day.
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