Raymond E. Feist

I'm having a senior moment here, so forgive me.

Yeah, and I think the part of it is that that's when it gets small.

That's when magic is sort of in the corner and not a lot of people do it.

One of the things about having a feudal medieval, everything from Tolkien to Game of Thrones and my stuff, is it's easy to understand

The individual stands out.

You know, the character that you're writing about is not the guy at the end of the hedgerow who's got the turnip farm and he's going to lucky if he makes it to his 40th birthday.

You know, you don't write about those people.

You write about, you know, Conan the Barbarian was this big muscular guy who was the last of his people making his way the best he could through a chaotic landscape of feudal kingdoms and

petty warlords and all that.

My biggest influence probably in the genre was Fritz Lieber.

And, you know, his Fafnir and the Grey Mouser stories are delightful and ironic and funny.

And his two protagonists are not nice people by most modern people's standards.

Well, it's also a huge question about general literature.

My father was born in 1910, okay, and so he was taught

in college before they threw him out of Columbia.

My father was thrown out of school for running illegal poker games in his dorm room.

So his father, my grandfather, sent him to California to work in the film business, which is how my father became a producer, director, writer, etc.

But even though he was a bit of a rascal, he brought into my life this sort of foundational sense of this is what an educated person

knows or has exposed to.

Now, I will pause this for a second by saying, since then I've come to learn there are other sources besides, you know, Western European white guys, you know, writing big tomes.