DL: What authors, Fantasy or otherwise, influence your writing?
PB: Even before I read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings he had a tremendous effect on my writing. I wrote Masques as an exercise to find out if I could actually write a book from beginning to end. I purposefully chose the most classic fantasy plot: evil wizard tries to take over the world while the valiant underdogs strive to stop him. For those of you who caught the implications, yes, this does mean that I read LOTR after I was a published writer - actually it was just this year. I must have read The Hobbit a bizillion times, but I tried to read LOTR when I was too young and unfortunately never got past it. I used to hang my head at SF Conventions...
When I started writing, I turned to other author's works to see how to do things. When I had trouble with the flow of conversation, I reached for a few of my favorite character-building authors and picked apart their conversations: Dick Francis, Barbara Hambly, Robert Parker, Jayne Anne Krentz, Anne McCaffrey.
But the writer who most influenced me would have to be Andre Norton. If my sister hadn't taken Black Beauty (which I recently read to my children and noticed that I still have large sections of it memorized) forcibly out of my hands and put Beast Master in instead - I would never have discovered how much fun adventurous reading could be.
DL: Are you planning to branch out into other genres?
PB: Not at the moment. As I mentioned earlier, fantasy allows me tremendous scope. When Demons Walk was a mystery with a light touch of politics. Hob's Bargain was a fairy tale and an apocalyptic/survival novel (which I would have had a hard time selling in the traditional genre of apocalyptic novels, SF). Dragon Bones is both a coming of age novel and a survival story in its own right. I do try to stretch and grow as a writer with each novel, both to keep my interest up and to keep my books from being repeats of earlier books, so I suppose changing genres is not out of the question, just unlikely in the near future.
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