Diving Into the Wreck

In an effort to make up for a lack of interviews a month or so ago, I will be doubling up weekly interviews for the next couple of weeks. Enjoy and thanks for your patience.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch, as detailed at her website,  is “an award-winning mystery, romance, science fiction, and fantasy writer. She has written many novels under various names, including Kristine Grayson for romance, and Kris Nelscott for mystery. Her novels have made the bestseller lists–even in London–and have been published in 14 countries and 13 different languages.

“Her novel, Diving into the Wreck, will be published by Pyr in November.  The sixth in her Retrieval Artist series, Duplicate Effort, appeared in February.  Her next short story collection, Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories, will appear from Golden Gryphon in spring of 2010.” As informative and interesting as her website clearly is (given how much I just quoted it), I was curious to learn more about her via an e-mail interview. My thanks to Kevin J. Anderson for getting me in contact with Rusch, and even more thanks to Rusch herself for her valuable time.

Tim O’Shea: What can tell folks about your new short story, “Flower Fairies,” which just appeared in the new issue of Realms of Fantasy?

Kristine Kathryn Rusch: I usually let the stories speak for themselves. So I hope people enjoy it!

O’Shea: From 2000 to the mid-2000s, you wrote several books under the pseudonyms “Kris Nelscott” and “Kristine Grayson”. Also you and your husband (Dean Wesley Smith) wrote under the name “Sandy Schofield” in the 1990s. Were the choices to work under different pseudonyms more of a business logistical decision as opposed to a creative choice?

Rusch: It’s both. I am a voracious reader, and I’ve learned that readers don’t always care for everything a writer does. So when I do something radically different, I put an open pen name on it. That way, my Grayson readers who are expecting a light funny romance don’t get surprised by The Fey novels, which are violent fantasy novels with no romance at all.

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