I have been meaning to write this for some time now but writing commitments have kept me busy and it’s just as well as it gave me the time to reflect a little deeper upon it all and think really why do we write? Why do we spend long days, weeks, months putting down on paper (or the screen) words that create worlds as realistic and deep as the one we live in, deeper than that if you like because the worlds we create, unlike the world we live in seem to call us, talk to us, speak in a voice we understand and in them we function without any problem.

Once you discount the obvious, and obviously false motives of fame and wealth (few authors manage to attain one or the other let alone both) what we are left with is what I call the ‘writer’s imperative’. Real writers write because we have no other choice. Writing is like breathing and we are compelled to write and, in this case, we write no matter what obstacles we face. We scribble down stories, events, ideas and odd pieces of dialogue on pieces of paper, on the back of napkins, on notebooks and envelopes, notepads, phones and PDAs. We write like our life depends on it without really understanding why and then, only then, do we think that what we have written must find a market and hope that someone will want to read it.

I have, for a few days now, been contemplating a very interesting question which a reader called Alex posed to me. He said (I assume it’s a he, but there’s now way to tell as written diction is so rarely gender-biased, and I know this is a can of worms waiting to be opened so I will forego the pleasure for now), that since we live in times where even our biological clocks can be tinkered with and digital worlds like ‘Second Life ’ make it so easy to be someone else and live a fantasy-filled, yet realistic, life, is there still a place for fantasy fiction in our life?

First Alex I would like to say that I know where you live, I have now purchased my ski mask and sharpened axe and I will be around tonight! Seriously though, this is a good question. Asking even if reading has a place in a world that lives on soundbites, digests, RSS Feeds, podcasts and emailed newsletters, is a very valid question.

I have always argued that you should never ask an actor to explain a film (and yes, we always do because how else are they going to promote it?) – they simply do not understand anything beyond their character and its motivation and yes, sometimes, even that, is different to what viewers see and like.

The same principle applies to novelists. Trying to explain a novel that is the result of chasing a vision and trying to render it as faithfully as possible on the page is like trying to put blinkers on the reader and asking him to try seeing things from where you are. So, I have, so far successfully, resisted attempts to get me to explain The Shade and have always preferred to let those who read it decide what it is they see in it.

Now, I am not going to break that rule and try to explain my creation but I have received, this weekend eleven emails wanting me to explain the sex & violence aspect of The Shade. Now here I do have a point of view as well as a cop-out answer. The latter first: that’s what I saw, live with it! That though would not be fair. So let’s begin from the beginning (skipping the dinosaurs, their extinction and the emergence of mammals).

One of the most frequently asked questions I am contacted about is what advice would I give to someone who wants to get into writing fantasy fiction. Well, I usually get a little facetious at around this point and I can email back laconic replies such as: “Don’t!” or semi-apocryphal ones such as “You can’t get into fantasy fiction, fantasy fiction has to get into you”, but I am writing this post which means I am now full of remorse and ready to put some things right so, please, all of you with whom I was a little high-handed (but for reasons which as you will see are entirely explicable), please forgive me.

I am a little comfortable in the knowledge that if any of you I have been sort of cavalier with do “get into Fantasy Fiction” and then get asked the same question by a million aspiring wannabes you will give them the same short treatment and probably feel a lot less remorseful than I do right now.

I really intended this round to be through the eyes of a Slinger and I am on purpose dissembling now, consciously removing the verisimilitude that creates the necessary suspension of disbelief and making a statement in order to show something deep.

As writers we labour hard to create worlds and characters that are real and they tend to take us over to the extend that our voice, in order to do ‘theirs’ justice simply gets subsumed by it. The Slingers, of course, are lonely people, living life on an edge that’s a lot more than metaphorical and, because of that, they have a perspective that can only be described as unique.

But writers, too, in the process of writing, find themselves alienated from what we call real, caught up in a world that’s deeper, more intimate and far more vivid than anything they might experience in real life and yet, by most accounts, fictional.

In the day of the internet with advanced web interactivity, talk of high-definition TV and cinema and even immersive hologram films in the horizon the question of how a book works seems to be both timely and a little archaic. Surely with role-playing games both online and on PS2 (and a dozen other consoles) the modern day equivalent of the story-teller around the campfire (or at the feast table) is about as relevant as discussing the Dodo’s wind-tunnel aerodynamics.

The experience of Amazon’s Kindle (which plays on the notion that you now may as well burn paper books) and the dearth of quality fiction seems to imply that the days of the book may well be numbered. As an author I am at the forefront of this a little because I both use new technology and have, in the past, experimented with eBooks (and still do through my website) and I am using the web to reach a global audience and talk to them in a way that would have been unthinkable even seven years ago (which in terms of the way time is counted on the internet makes it almost half a century ago). So the question is more than just a little relevant. Are traditional books dead?