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What would you be surprised if people didn’t know about you?

How well do you know your FR Authors? Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you can expect an update to the author roundtable, featuring many of our best Forgotten Realms authors’ answers to the world’s most important questions, right here on this blog. Submissions for new questions welcome through private message. 

Elaine Cunningham(co-author of The City of Splendors): Nothing comes to mind. I really don’t expect people to know stuff about me.

Ed Greenwood (author of The Sword Never Sleeps): That I like worldbuilding, and gaming, and fantasy. If they’ve heard of me at all, it’s probably in one of those contexts. I like to keep my career as an exotic dancer secr—oops.

Mark Sehestedt (author of The Fall of Highwatch): I don’t know. What don’t you know about me?

Richard Lee Byers (author of Unholy): That I write, I suppose.

Philip Athans (author of A Reader’s Guide to R.A. Salvatore’s Legend of Drizzt): That I started playing D&D the summer of 1978 and have been playing ever since. I came into the Book Department at TSR in September 1995 as the department’s “resident gamer,” if you can believe that.

Jak Koke (author of The Edge of Chaos): That I wrote a series of Shadowrun novels in the 90s . . . That for many years I was the managing editor for Per Aspera Press (where a certain soon-to-be famous fellow Forgotten Realms author and Eberron line editor got her start in editing.) That I go to Norwescon every year . . .

Jenna Helland (author of The Fanged Crown): I love books with pictures: kids’ books, graphic novels, illustrated encyclopedias (the more specific the better), how-to books in Gaelic. . . as long as there are illustrations, I’m happy.

Erin Evans (author of The God Catcher): I don’t write the way I talk. A long time ago I gave up worrying about how I sound in casual conversation—I like slang too much! I reflexively pepper my speech with “totally” and “like.” And when I get going (and I get going fast), there is no stopping the string of invented adjectives and adverbs. Sometimes the only difference between a one-dimensional teen stereotype’s dialogue and mine is that I can use “fewer” and “less” correctly. The only things that my speech has in common with my writing are that it flows very quickly, and I am insanely fond of metaphorical language in both.

Christopher Rowe (author of a story in Realms of the Dead): I’d be surprised if people didn’t know I’m from the South. Wait, I mean that I’d be surprised if people who’d met me in person didn’t know I’m from the South.

Erik Scott de Bie (author of Downshadow): It surprises me when people don’t know that I’m really tall, but it doesn’t surprise me at all when people don’t really have a sense of that height until they actually meet me. Then the eyes widen.

Jaleigh Johnson (author of Mistshore): Most people who know me should know that I’m terrified of spiders and large insects, especially grasshoppers. Salvador Dali had the right idea—you can’t trust those twitchy little buggers.

Richard Baker (author of Avenger): I’d be surprised if people didn’t know I was a Phillies fan. I’ve mentioned it in my author bios for like twelve years now. When I started doing it the Phillies were really pretty wretched. Now they’ve been one of the best teams in baseball for four or five years, and I’m a little worried that new readers might regard me as a fair-weather phan. Trust me, I paid my dues.

Rosemary Jones (author of City of the Dead): That I’m a passionate reader. After all I’ve written multiple books about collecting books.

Bruce R. Cordell (author of City of Torment): I’d be surprised if people didn’t know much my writing has been inspired by Lovecraft’s Mythos stories.

James P. Davis (author of Circle of Skulls): Why do you ask? Do you know something about me? Something surprising? Was that you I saw nosing around that old shed in my backyard? Well, just to be safe, I suppose now I’ll have to kill you too . . .

Lisa Smedman (author of Ascendancy of the Last): That I have tattoos. If they don’t know this, they’ve likely only seen me in winter, all bundled up.

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