The sun will soon be setting, and corpses make poor company by night. These were dark and dangerous men, alive. I doubt that death will have improved them.

Explain to me why it is more noble to kill ten thousand men in battle than a dozen at dinner.

And I tell you truly, Danaerys, there is no man in all the world who will ever be half so true to you as me.

I do know what’s been useless to me is the online fantasy name generators. I’ve tried those a few times, and they say, ‘Just hit this button and we’ll generate 50 fantasy names,’ and they all turn out to be ‘Grisknuckle’.

From where I sit, battles are hard. I’ve written my share. Sometimes I employ the private’s viewpoint, very up close and personal, dropping the reader right into the middle of the carnage. That’s vivid and visceral, but of necessity chaotic, and it is easy to lose all sense of the battle as a whole. Sometimes I go with the general’s point of view instead, looking down from on high, seeing lines and flanks and reserves. That gives a great sense of the tactics, of how the battle is won or lost, but can easily slide into abstraction.

Not all books are for all people. We read for different reasons.

I had these cheap alien toys and I made up stories for them. They were space pirates. They didn’t have names so I made up names. These were the first stories I wrote. Even as a little kid I was thinking about torture.