Drumbeats Read Online Free PDF

the writing process, carrying a microcassette recorder on long hikes throughout the West, including the ascent of each of Colorado’s 46 “fourteeners,” (peaks over 14,000 feet).
    In a recent exchange of e-mails, Kevin and I were discussing writing styles and habits, and he offered this revealing passage:
    A long time ago, my friend and collaborator Doug Beason made a joking comment when I suggested that I needed a break, a sabbatical. He said, “Kevin, if you ever stop writing, your head would explode!”
    And I knew he was right. My imagination is stuck in overdrive, for better or worse. Instead of a writer calling for a Muse to give him an idea, I’ve got a hyperactive Muse that won’t leave me alone.
    I feel as if my head is a pot filled with too many popcorn kernels, popping away, filling the container and pushing the lid up, and unless I keep shoveling the new stuff out, the whole thing will blow up on me. I’m writing as fast as I can to keep the growling, slavering Ideas from nipping too close at my heels.
    There was a US News & World Report article a few months ago about a newly “found” disease they called “hypergraphia,” the compulsion to write. They said writers like Sylvia Plath and Tolstoy were so obsessed with writing they often wrote as much as a thousand words a day. (A thousand words? Man, I’ve done over 10,000 words in a day!) I guess I’m an addict.
    I’m picturing you as a guy with a similar compulsion to drum, slapping your knees, the furniture, the walls, feeling a rhythm in your blood. It’s what you do. For me, stories are the drumbeats inside me. I’m always fabricating stories, characters, weird locations, plot twists. I’m just not happy “relaxing.” Sometimes I’m just banging around having fun, goofing with toys that I enjoy—as when I write Star Wars or comics or light books like Sky Captain ; other times I’m intense and working on something I think is Really Important, like Hopscotch . The “Seven Suns” books are a little of both, the biggest and most challenging story I’ve ever told, but damn, I’m having the time of my life with it, too.
    I’ve been saying for years and years, “soon I’ll slow down and take more time to smell the roses.” It’ll never happen, I suppose, because I just love the writing so much. Three days ago I started writing Seven Suns #5, and I was in absolute euphoria plotting the 112 chapters. This happens, then this happens, then this happens—I was discovering what my beloved characters were going to do, where they would end up, who would die, who would triumph. I came up with some twists and new ideas that were revelations to me, real lightning bolts from the hyperactive Muse—and best of all, they were so logical and inevitable in the universe of the story, that it seemed as if they were sewn into the fabric of my imagination from the very beginning, but I just didn’t realize it yet. Now that’s cool.
    So, yes, I would like to have that sense of stillness and the time to pay attention deeply to the things around me . . . but on the other hand, I can’t wait to see what happens next in the new novel that’s just over the horizon.
    And Kevin Anderson’s horizons are wider than most—infinite, really. His imagination roams the entire universe, creating strange new worlds and peopling them with strong, believable characters.
    From the philosophical depth of Resurrection Inc. and Hopscotch, to the novelizations for Star Wars and The X-Files; from the genre of “historical fantasy” (which I think Kevin invented —richly-imagined tales about Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Charles Dickens), to the breathtaking scope of his “imagineering” in the Seven Suns series, there have been so many excellent works that have delighted this reader, and millions of others.
    Among seemingly overlooked treasures, I fondly remember the fantasy trilogy, Gamearth, Gameplay, and Game’s End, now sadly out of print, but there are also