New interviews coming up!

If you've been hanging around these parts for a while, you probably recall that interviews used to be a regular feature on the Hotlist. Every month or so, there was at least one or two.

But in 2012, with the time I could spend blogging on the decline and the fact that doing interviews can be time-consuming, I finally decided to forgo them altogether. I was also growing tired of having the usual clique of brown-nosing cry-baby bloggers that hate me always criticizing my choice of questions and everything else in between.

I thought that these bloggers would pick up the slack and take over, that from now on they would be posting interviews with speculative fiction authors on their own online venues. Oddly enough, they didn't. Haters are going to hate, I know. Maybe I overestimated them, but it seemed that not a single soul in that bunch had any desire to go through the back-and-forth process of conducting an interview. Not surprisingly, as it's much easier to bitch about something than putting together an interesting Q&A.

Since I elected to stop, not a week goes by without a publicist, editor, or author asking me if I'd be willing to do an interview with this or that SFF writer on the Hotlist. They deplore the fact that few high-profile speculative fiction online venues feature frequent in-depth interviews. I've never thought that the world was a poorer place without mine, but I did feel bad because no one else appeared to be giving debut authors an opportunity to introduce themselves to a vast number of potential readers.

Since 2012, there have been a few interviews posted here, yet they are few and far between. I almost resumed doing so more regularly last year, but time constraints once more prevented me from doing so.

Having cut down my hours at work until mid-March, I recently found myself with more free time than I've had in many a year. The timing seemed perfect for doing a few interviews and I contacted a number of authors who were about to release a novel or had just published something to see if they were interested in answering some questions I had for them. The replies were positive and quick in coming, and I suddenly had a few interviews lined up.

Coming soon, you guys will be getting interviews with Tad Williams, Jacqueline Carey, Bradley P. Beaulieu, Mark Lawrence, Myke Cole, and Peter V. Brett. I'm still waiting to hear back from a few others, so more authors might join this group.

Depending on how everything goes, interviews might return as a semi-regular feature on the Hotlist. We'll have to wait and see. . .