That all depends on too many factors to consider.  Right now, I’m committed for almost a year in advance, in finishing the last book about Quaeryt in The Imager Portfolio and then to another Recluce book.  After that… I just haven’t thought that far ahead.  I wouldn’t be opposed to it, but I’d have to develop a very different magical concept… and that’s far from easy.

I think the paradoxical answer to that is because I’m an optimist.  I really think that if I discuss difficult issues and problems people will consider them, and I hope that such discussions and thoughts will help lead to solutions.  One thing that I do know is that you can’t solve a problem that you refuse to acknowledge even exists… or one that you accept as a “fact of life,” rather than as a problem.

Technically speaking, fanfiction is an infringement of copyright, and if someone gets paid for that, without the permission of the author, that’s definitely a violation of copyright.  At the same time, I don’t have a problem with fanfiction that’s restricted to a comparatively limited number of fans and not used in any commercial fashion. Fanfiction in that sense is a gesture of appreciation, but I would hope that it might be the first step for many of those fan writers toward creating their own worlds and characters, because we can always use more good writers.

Actually, the location of Vanderbraak Centre in our world is that of Plymouth, New Hampshire, the site of Plymouth State University, where I taught for several years in the early 1990s.  I obviously changed the arrangement of the town to a certain degree, but not that of the river or the bridge, or where the main streets are located, simply because in towns such as Plymouth/Vanderbraak Centre there’s usually a geographic and practical reason for their placement.  The university in the “Ghost” books is also located in the same place as Plymouth State is in our world.

At this point, I have doubts whether it will ever be reprinted, given that it was, charitably stated, far less than a commercial success despite favorable reviews — and, for what it’s worth, was my father’s favorite of all the books I had written.

Princeps is currently scheduled for a May 2012 release date, but I don’t know yet whether that will be early or late in the month.

That’s a question to which the almost any short answer would be misleading.  In the strictest sense, I have no idea how many editors I’ve had, for several reasons.  First, I have no way to determine how many editors looked at my early stories that were published by various magazines, only that they had to number more than four.  Second, while all but one of my novels have been edited by David Hartwell,virtually all of them were also edited by whoever his assistant editor was at the time.  The only book for which David was not the head editor was edited by John Douglas, who had been David’s assistant editor at Timescape and who bought my second novel for Avon at a time when David was between editing positions. Since David has been my editor for over thirty years I can’t even remember, let alone count all of the editors who have worked with him and me… except I can say that the vast majority turned out to be good editors in their own right [while I may not recall all the faces or names, any writer recalls a bad editor or copy-editor, and I don't recall any bad editors, but I still recall the one terrible copy-editor].

No… I did not mean to imply that I would be writing a third “subseries” in The Imager Portfolio.  What I meant was that the second subseries will have four books, rather than my typical two or three about a given character or set of characters. That doesn’t mean I won’t write another Imager subseries at some point in the future, but it won’t be in the immediate future after I finish the fourth book in the current subseries.

Tor/Macmillan did design and set up the website initially and provided technical support for somewhat less than two years, but that arrangement turned out to be unsatisfactory to both parties for a number of reasons, and Tor agreed to turn over the website to me and generously paid for the transition to a new server and for the registration of the domain to me for a number of years.  For the past several years I’ve been totally responsible, but the more technical aspects are handled by the Nebula-winning writer Eric James Stone — who’s also a great web designer and maintainer.

Will you ever have a brewer as a main character in the Saga of Recluce?

Alas… probably not, not because I have anything against brewers, but because I couldn’t possibly do justice to such a character.  It’s not beyond the realm of possibility, however, that I might work in a strong minor character who’s a brewer, but that will have to be several years from now, at the least.