Want to know a fun fact? Contributing to Tales of the Crimson Keep was the first time I’d written in an already-established world. It was both exciting and a bit intimidating—as most new things are. As far as sandboxes go, the Crimson Keep was a pretty vast and flexible one. The premise of an ever-changing fortress with unlimited possibilities within the walls meant that nearly anything was possible.
At the same time, the first edition of the anthology was already out, and there’d already been many stories set in this world. The last thing I wanted was to write something that would be inconsistent with what was established.
The first thing I did was read every scrap of the first edition to get a feel for what kinds of stories fell into the world of the Crimson Keep. The answer: many kinds. Some were funny, and some were more serious. But all felt like they were skating across a glimmering pool of whimsy.
I decided to leave the established characters be and introduce the Keep to someone new: a visitor from another part of the world who, like me, was seeing the Keep for the first time. And so I created the character of Meilin, a girl who came all the way from the Far East on a quest to the Keep. How fascinated would she be by the fortress’ dangers and charms? How much trouble would she run into?
The first sword and sorcery I ever read was Robert E. Howard’s Conan, in the books published in the mid-1960s in paperback by Lancer Books, with the soon to become iconic cover paintings by Frank Frazetta. My father had brought home a recently published paperback edition of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs that someone had left behind at his office. I recognized the Ape Man from the movies I’d seen on TV, but I wasn’t prepared for what I read. It was like I had discovered the real-life version of what was, essentially, portrayed as a grunting cartoon character in the movies. It floored me. I still think it’s a great novel, as close to literature as pulp fiction got when it was published in 1912. I reread it every few years.
