This month’s issue of Death Ray (issue 10) features my interview with Stephen Donaldson, as you may have noticed from the post below.

As is inevitably the case with these things, a few answers had to be trimmed a little and a few others had to be missed out altogether to fit the space available in the magazine, so there’s a few outtakes and a few extended highlights which I will be posting on this blog over the coming days. For now, however, you can read the full interview in Death Ray magazine, and below is a small excerpt from one of the questions we were forced to cut for reasons of space.

In the interview, Stephen talks about his decision not to write The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - a story he conceived at the same time as The Second Chronicles - immediately after completing the two earlier trilogies, because of his feeling that he needed first to improve as a writer. I asked Stephen if the stories he wrote in the meantime were specifically chosen to help him develop his abilities in certain ways, and here’s what he had to say:

“This question comes up most often in the form of: ‘Do you know what you’re going to write next? What are you gonna do after you’ve finished The Last Chronicles. The truth is I’ve no earthly idea, but I never had had an idea. I don’t try to answer that question until I’ve finished the story that’s right in front of me. Once it’s done then I say ‘oh, ok, now what will I write next?’. And the same has been true for the past twenty years. I haven’t searched for ideas that would help me prepare for Covenant, I’ve just searched for ideas that felt like they were so exciting it felt absolute necessary to write them.”

Read the interview in issue 10 of Death Ray (on sale now) and check back here for more outtakes soon.