Q: What inspired you to write The Game of Sunken Places? Which ideas came to you first?

A: As a kid, I loved fantasy novels, especially novels like Susan Cooper’s and C. S. Lewis’s, in which kids on vacation end up having to defend themselves against big fangy things from other worlds. Also, I loved role-playing games, both ones played on paper like Dungeons and Dragons and computer text-adventures. (It was the eighties.) Really, it was the joy of these early imaginative experiences that I wanted to catch—that feeling of camaraderie and exhilaration when you and your friends are sitting up until three in the morning, trying to solve some riddle, and everything smells like Doritos.

So I thought of the game first, and the friends. I thought of the empire—I love fallen empires—and the troll. From there, I just started writing.

Q: The final chapters contain some truly jaw-dropping surprises. Did you know from the start how everything was going to end?

A: Well, therein lies an interesting story. The whole first draft of the novel didn’t have many of those “jaw-dropping surprises”!

I first wrote this novel when I was about eighteen years old. It was much longer and the plot was much more obvious. At the time, as I recall it, I sent it out to publishers, but of course received nothing but rejections—because it was far too clearly the work of someone who didn’t know what he was doing.

Several years passed. I graduated from college, went to graduate school, and published a couple of other novels. But I always remembered The Game of Sunken Places as a project that had really captured my imagination.

When I went back and read it over, I still loved it, even though it was incredibly incompetent. The humor was clumsy, the pacing was terrible—long, heartfelt discussions between the boys about ethics, video games, food allergies, and how to survive summer camp.

I wrote the story over again, typing it in anew so that I didn’t feel too attached to anything which had been there previously. As I typed, I realized that there were some opportunities for surprise that I hadn’t considered before. In the draft I wrote as a teenager, Brian and Gregory were pitted against Jack Stimple, pure and simple. I changed all sorts of things to complicate the situation, setting in place the seeds of new conflict.

So no, for several years the manuscript existed without some of those “surprises”! They were a surprise to me, too.

Q: Do you resemble one boy more than the other? Or are they simply two lobes of the author’s brain, as Gregory might say?

A: I think I probably sound more like Gregory, because I am loud and goofy; but I always understood myself to be more like Brian—more reserved, slightly mopey, and anxious about ethical niceties. If I’m loud, it’s because I’m so shy.

More than anyone, I resemble the troll.

Q: Did you find it difficult to write from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old?

A: Yes, occasionally, since that forces me to demonstrate a kind of emotional maturity I have not yet achieved. What helps me, however, is that I still very much have a boy’s sense of the “cool” in fantasy. I love weird, macabre scenes with bizarre monsters, interesting equipment, and impossible architecture. For example, I was incredibly excited when my editor showed me the cover of this book—it was exactly the kind of thing I had pictured, just the right balance of classic boys’ novel and fantastical vista.

Also, I think that I still have a strong sense of what friendship feels like when you’re young—the intensity of it—the drama of learning about the world together and creating a world together. That is one of the things this book is about.

Q: Some of the most moving moments in The Game of Sunken Places involve Kalgrash and his struggle to accept his mechanical origins. Do you see any parallels between Kalgrash’s search for meaning and the boys’ mission to win the game?

A: Hmm. Interesting idea. I guess it is all about searching for meaning and discovering that in some way, you have to create your own meaning. We all receive a game board without instructions—and it’s up to us to figure out how we want to play.

Q: Do you think it will be very long before all of us are hanging out with hi-tech clockwork creatures who think they’re real?

A: Every time I go out dancing, I meet more of them.

Q: When you conceived of the Norumbegans, was their exile inspired in any way by the native tribes who originally inhabited the Green Mountain State?

A: Funny you should ask that—Norumbega is the name of a mythical New England city sought by European settlers in the early seventeenth century. It was probably, in actuality, a Native American community of some kind—though of course the Europeans believed it was a fabulous place full of gold and miracles.

Q: What kinds of games do you enjoy the most?

A: I’ve heard it said that in the olden days, when people used to talk about the emperor of Japan, instead of saying, “He ate,” they had to say, “He play-ate.” Instead of saying, “He slept,” they had to say, “He play-slept.” And so on. The idea was that all of life was a game for the emperor, something he was pretending to do, that at the same time, he performed activities and just acted like he was performing them.

A lot of my favorite people are like that.