Greg Van Eekhout Quotes

'California Bones' is the first volume in my trilogy about Daniel Blackland, a wizard trying to survive in a world that eats wizards. It's a book about friends and family, trust and betrayal, the love of power and the power of love.

I try to eat vegetarian, though I'm not very good at it, and it's a work in progress. But we basically are what we eat. Eat fat, and there's fat in your body. Eat protein, and there's protein in your body. Eat magic, and there's magic in your body.

As a reader, I tend not to get too much from tales of unrelenting grimness.

To act as though we have hope is to keep hope alive

In everything I write, I'm always striving to hit the right mix of light and darkness, humor and pain, fun and seriousness.

I grew up in Los Angeles, and I was always fascinated by the La Brea Tar Pits. Right in the middle of the city, in an area called the Miracle Mile, for crying out loud, we have these eldritch ponds of dark, bubbling goo. And down in the muck, there're all these amazing fossils: mammoth and saber tooth cat and dire wolf.

We wanted you to achieve the greatest osteomancy you were capable of."
"What if I wanted to be a professional baseball player?"
"Then we would have found you the best coaches and bought you a really good mitt. Did you want to be a professional baseball player?"
"Naw. I got hit in the eye with a ball once and set it on fire.

In high school, I stole a six-foot submarine sandwich from a banquet room in front of several hundred people. I did it because I was in marching band, and we were promised food if we played, and they broke their promise. It was my first and only heist, motivated by justice and hunger.

If 'Star Wars' wasn't enough to prepare me for a dark future, there was the 'Planet of the Apes' franchise, conveniently repeated for me in Los Angeles on KABC's Channel Seven 3:30 movie. Apes enslaving humans! Mutants with boils and an atom bomb! Ape riots in Century City! They killed baby Caesar's parents!

At a certain point in the writing of any book, you become absolutely certain that it's terrible and is only getting more terrible with every word you write. This is normal. You just have to keep going, push your way through, and have faith that, through practice and experience and determination, you will get to the end.

There's a certain amount of world-building that I hold off on until I need it for the story. World building in advance isn't really my thing, maybe because I didn't grow up playing RPG's.

The stakes in my books tend to be kind of ridiculously high. In 'Kid vs. Squid,' the question is whether or not the California coast will be subsumed by the ocean in favor of the creation of a new Atlantis. In 'The Boy at the End of the World,' what's at stake is the survival of the human species.

Cowabunga," said Cassandra, impressed.
Daniel grinned. He liked impressing her.
"'All my being,'" Emma whispered, "'like him whom the Numidian seps did thaw into a dew with poison, is dissolved, sinking through its foundations.'
"That's from a poem," she said with some despair to the crew's stupefied expressions.
"Yeah, Shelley," said Moth. "It's just we don't usually do poetry during jobs.

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Being part of the original 'Star Wars' generation, I have always known a dark future.