How far in advance do you plan the Recluce books? Did you already have Nylan’s story worked out when you wrote The Magic of Recluce? What about Cerryl’s story from Colors of Chaos when you wrote The Magic Engineer?

As I’ve written elsewhere, I wrote The Magic of Recluce as a singleton just to prove that I could write a fantasy. I had no plans at all for a sequel, let alone a series. So when David Hartwell asked for another Recluce book, I initially had a hard time coming up with The Towers of the Sunset. In any book I write, however, I put in bits of past history, because every viable culture has a past, and this habit/tool has allowed me to weave together the histories within the world of Recluce. Even well before I finished The Magic Engineer, I was thinking about how Justen ended up where he did and about Fairhaven and how it had to be more than just power-hungry white wizards.