pros and cons

Yesterday they made me record a podcast, for book-marketing purposes, in a studio and everything. It took over an hour to produce enough material for them to be able to cut my ramblings and muttered asides and gormless pauses and bursts of unmotivated swearing down to maybe ten minutes of usable coherent-sounding material. Exhausting. Poor me, poor me.They ask you things about why you wrote the kind of book you wrote, why the setting, why this, why that. Why a fantasy? Here is the answer. If you write books set in made-up worlds, you don't have to do any boring research or know anything about things. On the other hand, you do have to make up silly new names for days of the week, currency, and (depending on how conscientious you are) fruit. This is OK the first time you do it, but quickly becomes a chore. At some point, around the third or fourth book perhaps, the balance of irritations tips. This is when you start thinking seriously about "alternative history" writing.