The original transcript has a lot of people saying hello to each other, and changing their nicks occasionally, and other things that you probably don't care about. I took those out. Also, the original was nowhere near this coherent. Threads wandered all over the place, spaced out by people's typing speeds, especially my own. Things have been greatly rearranged to make the thing much more readable.

Click on the yellow numbers to get answers that weren't given on the night of the Q&A.

While trying to keep up with the frenzied pace of the chat, I find, looking back, that I dropped a number of questions on the floor. I didn't mean to, and I've got your answers right here.

[1] SirRichard I don't know what happens but I just get a subject or a idea in my head and I just start typing. I guess it shows in my writing, right, Pf?

Pfantazm No more so than my own stories. I don't develop my ideas while I'm doing my actual writing, but the overwhelming majority of what I write was improvised right then and there. Like I said, I'm coming up with excuses to use scenes that I've already thought of, and that are extremely well-developed. Most of the time, I know that I'm doing something with the intention of hooking up the current thread of the plot to one of those scenes, but I usually just get there however my mind wants to take me.

[2] JustinCase Do you ever catch yourself second guessing one of your characters, Pfantazm? You know, you get a sudden burst, and your fingers just fly, then you read it, and aren't quite satisfied?

Pfantazm Never. I occasionally find myself distrusting my narrative voice, in that I tend to overexplain and get off-topic, but when it comes to what my characters think, say, and do, I trust them/me completely. I told this story to someone recently, but as you've seen from comparing this to my biography, I like repeating my best lines, so here goes. I watched one of the early Oprah's Book Club talks, and there was a lady on who'd written a novel in which one of her characters committed suicide. She'd been in tears and got on the phone to her mother: "Mom, James just killed himself." The mother told her to just go back and write it differently. I got it. I knew why she couldn't. Your characters are going to do what they're going to do, and you can't do much to argue with them. You're just the author.

[3] JasonC Puzzle writing?

Pfantazm Yes. I've had a couple of things published in magazines, and the convention that I talked about where I lost my virginity was a puzzler's convention.

[4] shdowgod How do you overcome an awkward moment?

Pfantazm I wish I knew. Usually I just throw my brain at the problem, usually over a period of weeks, until it goes away. I know that I hit a point where I don't know what my characters are up to, and I'm not sure where I want them to go. Right now, I'm left with either waiting for inspiration, or writing a sentence or three and giving up again until next time. If anyone has a better idea, I'm all ears.

[5] shdowgod Yeah, the line that starts, "Let me describe myself," is horrible.

Pfantazm Not a question. Ask me if I care. I agree with ShadowGod, as I prefer to call him, but I'm guilty of this myself. In GLCi3, in the scene in the diner where John first meets Alan, he says, "Allow me to describe myself," and he says he's average-looking, without a third eyeball or nipple. I hope Shadow can forgive me.

[6] TCD Amen to that, Pfan.

Pfantazm The last shot fired in the quality-vs.-quantity debate we had going. And then my computer dies. Coincidence, I swear. Just so you can tell your players, here's the scorecard: SirRichard started it, distracting me from [3] by accusing me of disliking erotica. He's an author, and at the time, I was editing his latest story, "Lumbering Jacks". (I'm not anymore, but this whole thing wasn't the reason why.) Collin is on his side, but I don't know him at all. ShadowGod and TCD are firmly in my camp, and probably sharing a sleeping bag. ThaChillinDude is the author of "Taming of the Night", and ShadowGod recently started "Destiny of Time". Both are in the SF section. Given that JustinCase archived my single longest chunk of fiction on his site, I suspect he appreciates the long stories too. The others never explicitly stated their affiliation to my satisfaction, so I won't speak for them here. I can understand SirRichard's and Collin's positions, to some extent. I can see the use of a nice, short story that gets you off in under 10K. (For comparison, the chapters of the Procurers are each about 20K; the shortest self-sufficient story of mine with real sex clocks in at 38K.) I've even read a few of them that looked interesting, and jerked off to them. What they seem to fail to realize is that jerking off is not the only reason I read this stuff. I like my stories, and I don't just mean the ones I write. I've grilled unsuspecting newbies who've come into the chat rooms about their lives, their opinions and their kinks. In part, I've done it to research a possible future story, and in part, I just like the information. I like to understand. I mentioned during this Q&A that I'd like to see the future past my own natural life span. When I die, the story of humanity will almost certainly be going on without me. I don't like that idea. As I clumsily tried to explain while frantically typing to keep up with the barrage of questions, simply telling me "he was a hot man" will not satisfy me. His stats will allow me to visualize your stud du jour, and nothing else. I will not be able to drum up any empathy for a character if I can't somehow get to know him. I have to like him before I will enjoy imagining him getting off. That's the simple truth. In the story SirRichard sent me to edit, he was reduced to referring to characters during a gang bang by number, marking their place in line to the central character's ass. Guy #1 fucked him and left. Guy #2 fucked him and left. Guy #3 and #4 fucked him together and left. Are we there yet? Aren't these people blond or brunet, tall or short, lean or muscular, young or old? When I pointed this out, the feeling I got was that he was so afraid of turning off a reader by giving someone an unsatisfactory description, that he was left giving them almost no description at all. To be fair, in other parts of the story, which is as long as some of mine are, SirRichard doesn't reduce things to nearly this level. The characters have names and faces, but in that one scene in the dark, all the cats are grey. If that appeals to you more than getting inside a character's head before getting them into bed, that's fine. I don't have any problem with it. Scout's honour. It means you won't want to read any of my stories. That's fine too. I don't want you to read them if you're not going to like the style. Don't waste your time, and it will be a long time you'd be wasting. For the time being, anyway, there's room enough for both sorts of stories in the Archive.

[7] Kip Is there a relationship between Mathematics and Literature? There seems to be! --- Yeah, I was thinking of the mathematicians who turned writers and philosophers.

Pfantazm Well, philosophy and mathematics do have an overlap. It's called Logic. (Check out your local college's course calendar. If they offer it, I bet Logic is a philosophy course.) There's some correlation between math and music, I know. Both are about patterns, so there's the similar mindset there. The only famous mathie author I can think of off the top of my head is Lewis Carroll. Mathies tend to be heavy into the whole SF&F scene, maybe more so than the science types in general. I think it all comes under the general label of "geek", though. The correlation is even stronger among Computer Science types, for example. Mainly when I think of mathies and philosophy, I think of the wackos. Yes, Pythagoras had his theorem in triangles, but he also had his little cult that put the Scientologists to shame. And Newton? Sure, he (co-)invented calculus, but we're talking serious underpants-on-the-head-wearing time. Serious issues about women there. (Back to the whole geek chic thing again.) Go look up their biographies. Nutters, the pair of them. Or just rent A Beautiful Mind, why don'tcha. (Better yet, read the biography. He's still bi in the book.)

[8] hifive You look French.

Pfantazm Sigh. I get this a lot. My ancestry is English and Scottish with a dash of Norwegian. No French, no Italian, no Irish. There was the time that an entire warehouseful of people unanimously decided I was Portuguese. A man came up to me in an airport and told me, "Pardon me, you look Albanian."