Could you tell us how you started out as an author and how that led to your work on the early Buffy novels with Nancy Holder?
I had actually started writing in earnest with stories in High School, but it wasn’t what I thought I would actually do. Actually, I thought that I wanted to go to film school.
By the time I graduated from High School, l thought maybe film school wasn’t the most practical of things I could choose, so I tried to get the best education I could. While I was in college, I took numerous creative writing courses My creative writing teacher said "You might want to think about going to film school," which I thought was very funny.
While I was writing there, even though most of the people who were in my classes wanted to write about marching on Washington, I wanted to write about zombies marching on Washington.
While I was in college I started writing my first novel, a vampire novel called Of Saints and Shadows. I sold that and its sequel and got involved in writing numerous other novels. I had also done X Men, which is a media tie in.
I had been talking to Nancy Holder about writing together - in fact, we’d talked about it several times over the course of a few years and nothing ever seemed to be right. The day after he pilot episode of Buffy aired, we talked to each other on the phone and said, "this is it, this is what we need to do."
Joss had invented the best toys and we really wanted to play with them, so we had our agents contact (publishers) Simon and Schuster in the US. They had never heard of either one of us, which was fine but we were able to say to them, "look we’ve written horror, each of us individually has written horror" and I had done already quite a bit of media tie-in.
Nancy had done some video game work in Japan as well and so they gave us a shot and asked us to write a young adult Buffy novel in four weeks. We wrote it in three and a half. I found it really interesting that some people hated that book and some people have it as their favourite. That was Halloween Rain.
