Greg van Eekhout
Greg van Eekhout
Greg van Eekhout is a science fiction and fantasy writer. His "In the Late December"was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story, and his middle-grade fantasy novel The Boy at the End of the World was nominated for the 2012 Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy...
ProfessionWriter
too-much tales reader
As a reader, I tend not to get too much from tales of unrelenting grimness.
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In high school, I stole a six-foot submarine sandwich from a banquet room in front of several hundred people. I did it because I was in marching band, and we were promised food if we played, and they broke their promise. It was my first and only heist, motivated by justice and hunger.
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Being part of the original 'Star Wars' generation, I have always known a dark future.
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In everything I write, I'm always striving to hit the right mix of light and darkness, humor and pain, fun and seriousness.
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At a certain point in the writing of any book, you become absolutely certain that it's terrible and is only getting more terrible with every word you write. This is normal. You just have to keep going, push your way through, and have faith that, through practice and experience and determination, you will get to the end.
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I feel lucky that my career so far has included books for adults and books for kids. They're equally important to me, and I hope I get to continue writing both.
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I grew up in Los Angeles, and I was always fascinated by the La Brea Tar Pits. Right in the middle of the city, in an area called the Miracle Mile, for crying out loud, we have these eldritch ponds of dark, bubbling goo. And down in the muck, there're all these amazing fossils: mammoth and saber tooth cat and dire wolf.
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If 'Star Wars' wasn't enough to prepare me for a dark future, there was the 'Planet of the Apes' franchise, conveniently repeated for me in Los Angeles on KABC's Channel Seven 3:30 movie. Apes enslaving humans! Mutants with boils and an atom bomb! Ape riots in Century City! They killed baby Caesar's parents!
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The stakes in my books tend to be kind of ridiculously high. In 'Kid vs. Squid,' the question is whether or not the California coast will be subsumed by the ocean in favor of the creation of a new Atlantis. In 'The Boy at the End of the World,' what's at stake is the survival of the human species.
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There's a certain amount of world-building that I hold off on until I need it for the story. World building in advance isn't really my thing, maybe because I didn't grow up playing RPG's.