LS: It's about love. It's about a bunch of different people falling in and out of love. It has a sort of fragmented structure, which I think is inevitable if you're trying to write a book while writing a bunch of other books. If you don't read it, it means you're against love. Everyone should read it.
AC: Good marketing strategy.
LS: I just made it up while we were talking.
AC: I read in another interview that you spent five years writing in New York City, growing more and more bitter as you were unable to publish "The Basic Eight." How did you deal with that?
LS: I don't think I did. I just became increasingly more bitter (laughing). I think it's really hard to be working hard on fiction and be unpublished. I tried to tell myself over and over again that perhaps someday I would be published and I would look back on these years as sort of bohemian and wild, but when you're actually doing it, it's no fun at all. And that still has not happened.
I don't know how you deal with it. It's really difficult. Particularly in New York, if you're trying to pay attention to literary culture, it's everywhere, and you see a lot of bad writing that's doing very well, and that's hard. I think that in a lot of other professions as you get better and better you tend to naturally be rewarded, and that's not necessarily true in fiction and that's really hard. It's hard to have a novel that you think is better than a lot of other stuff that's out there that nobody wants to publish.
AC: You've said that you will only write 13 Lemony Snicket novels, but obviously with the success of these books, your publisher would not be opposed if you said you're writing more. Do you plan to write more than 13 Lemony Snicket books, or is there a plan for a different series?
LS: I would like to keep writing for both children and adults. I've always said there would only be 13 books. That was always pretty clear. I think if I said, hey there's going to be 20 after all, I'm sure that they would let me do it. But there hasn't been any pressure to do it.
AC: Do you have any specific plans for a different series?
LS: There are a few ideas I want to work on.
AC: Do you have any favorite questions that kids have asked you?
LS: This kid at a reading the other day asked if I had a hot tub, and I said no. So he said that neither did Christopher Paolini -- Christopher Paolini wrote Eragon, a popular children's series. I said, well, that's why Christopher Paolini and I had never been in a hot tub together, because every time we were together we'd say your hot tub or mine, and we'd both have to say we didn't have one, which is why Christopher Paolini and I have remained total strangers rather than hot tub partners.
AC: Obviously you have a sarcastic nature. The children who are reading your books are at an age bracket at which they're beginning to understand and grapple with irony, the fact that you can say something that's different from what you actually mean. Do you find that when children are talking to you that they really respond to that?
LS: I think that the demarcation of whether or not you're going to be able to understand irony -- the beginning of irony -- happens for people at different ages, for sure, and sometimes never happens, so in some ways, if you want to see whether your child has a healthy sense of irony, give them my book (laughing).
Irony is just one part of it, but I think that as you grow up you begin to look critically at the world and you note the disparity between what people are saying and how it goes. The way the books run is contrary to what everyone says all the time. In many children's books good people are rewarded and bad people are punished, and you see when you are very young that the world just doesn't go that way. I think that's something akin to irony, though it's not a textbook definition of irony. The idea that bad behavior is always punished will begin to ring false if you're actually in a schoolyard.
