Janny Wurts: At this point, if it's not an author that I really love, and it's going to take time away from my own work, I'm not going to do it. When Guy [Gavriel] Kay called and asked my husband Don [Maitz] and I to collaborate on the Fionavar Tapestry [three-book series], I just jumped on it, because I love his work. That's such a visual work, and the symbolism is so deep. It's just fantastic.

So it depends on the book. If somebody wants me as an illustrator, and if I like the work, and something in it intrigues me that I feel I can express what's on that page and bring something to it of value to me, then I'll take time away from my work and do it.

Crescent Blues: In other words, time makes it an either/or situation.

Janny Wurts: If I'm painting your story, then I'm putting one of mine on the shelf to do it. I certainly don't want to sound arrogant or like I'm not willing. I'm very willing to work in someone else's viewpoint. Some of the richest stuff I've ever done has been when I stepped outside of my own little hut and tried on somebody else's shoes. The trick is that there has to be some attraction or interest in it, because I'm beyond the point where I want to do any job just to make the money. It's a waste of my time. If I can't bring 100 percent of what I can bring to something, if it doesn't grab me, why bother?

I'm past the point in my life -- and I have been probably since high school -- of having somebody tell me, you have to do something "just because." There's no "because" more important than the question: am I going to give this 100 percent of my effort, my time and attention? Is it going to bore me? Is some piece of me going to be switched off? If the answer comes back that I can't put 100 percent in, I don't want to die for 20 percent. Then you're living at 80 percent or 70 percent. I'm not going to give up that piece of myself, even for five minutes. It's not worth it.

I'm making this point strongly, because as we grow up we're taught it might have to be that way. "You can never have everything you want." "You might as well put up and shut up." I don't believe that's true, and I would urge people, don't buy it. Don't buy it. It makes for a very boring life.

Crescent Blues: What's it like collaborating with your husband?

Janny Wurts: It's easy for me, because I've done it before. I pretty much knew what a collaboration involved, and I had hit the walls with it and passed through to the other side where, look at it, you've got something that was totally different, because you had two minds. And I understood very well the concept that you're not driving your own train, and when the two trains wreck, you're going to get a third track that's better than either one of you -- or different -- and you're going to love it just as well. So don't pay attention to the train wreck. Look at the tangent.

[Don had] never done this before, so it was a bit of a discovery for him to find his way, but I think he gladly did it. Once he realized, no, you're not in control of this picture, you're going to have to let go, it went quite smoothly. So we'd do it again, I would guess, if the right project came along.

Crescent Blues: You've mentioned in interviews that music plays a very important role in your life and that you frequently listen to music when you're writing. How many instruments do you play?

Janny Wurts: I've got an attic full. They're predominantly stringed instruments, but I just do it, because I enjoy it. I do little odds and ends, playing this or that. I wouldn't say you would stop the world to hear whatever I was playing, but I'm usually competent enough to do it in public. I do it for my own enjoyment. I really get a bang out of sound.

It's a very direct medium. It's comparatively easy to compose a song. (Now, you'll notice, I didn't say compose a good song.) It's very direct. You don't have to go through these layers and stages of saying, "Now, I really want to express that, and I've got to use a symbol to get there, and that symbol's not right, and this symbol's not right." With sound, the note's either right or wrong, and you know which way to push it. It's very fluid.

Crescent Blues: Bagpipes seem to have a lot of wrong notes.

Janny Wurts: Who have you been listening to?

I was very fortunate. I love bagpipes; not everybody does. When I went to Scotland after high school, I heard a solo bagpiper playing in the pass at Culloden. That man knew how to play. I heard the instrument tuned as it was supposed to be tuned and played as it was supposed to be played. The harmonics that come off that instrument when it is properly tuned are mind-blowing. Literally. I think people hate pipes sometimes, because they do alter the synapses of the brain.

So when I came back from that trip, I said, I'm going to learn how to do this. Like most people in this country, I took the first teacher I could get. That was a mistake. But I worked really hard, and I got passed on to another teacher and another, and eventually I wound up with a teacher who was taught by a world-class player who has won world-class prizes. He is really an incredible musician. Now [bagpiping] has become a year upon year study. I've learned a great deal from this man.

When you say pipes don't sound that great, you've never heard them the way they're designed to be played. It's an art form. When those pipes are tuned, they will not sound sour. They will not sound out of tune. They will not hurt your ears.

They will alter your state of mind. It's like a meditation. They will shift [your perceptions]. You're either going to hate that, and come out clawing and screaming, or you're going to follow it for blocks.

Crescent Blues: I imagine it's also a function of the context in which the pipes are played. If they're played in the pass at Culloden…

Janny Wurts: A well-tuned set of pipes will sound great almost anywhere. If it's correctly tuned -- even loud, even in an enclosed room -- it's not going to destroy your hearing. It's when they're not tuned properly, and usually people do not set them up properly.

There are people who have written on the music of the pipes. You basically have nine notes with no sharps and flats. It's a pentatonic scale. You have three drones and a precise combination of scale notes, which are not tempered. Those drones create the most harmonics [per] fifth that it is possible to have. It's not arbitrary where they set those pipes up.

When you listen to a well-tuned set of pipes, as the scale notes shift and it's not a tempered scale, you're going to hear those harmonics come and go. The sound is going to affect you. It's going to lure you. It's going to create harmonics in your body. You're going to feel it happening.

I've tuned pipes in what amounted to a tiled bathroom, which is the god-awfullest place to tune in the world. But with all that reflective surface, you really understood what each of those notes is doing.

The original music the pipes were meant to play is not what you hear on the street. It's not the marches. It's not the dance tunes, hornpipes and jigs I'm going to do tonight. They wrote what they call the Great Music, which is a state of emotion, and it puts you in an altered state of mind. When you hear that done as it's supposed to be played, taught by a teacher who knows how to teach it -- you cannot learn it off sheet music -- you'll understand why they banned the pipes as a weapon of war.

And I'm not saying that, necessarily, it altered your mind toward war. It didn't. It maybe evoked a totally different emotion. But you would fight for that, to keep that.

It's a phenomenal instrument. The knowledge [about the pipes] is getting better. There are lots of people who know the band music, so the average person says, "Oh yeah, I've heard pipes." But if they hated it or said it sounded out of tune or it was sour, they didn't hear a set of pipes that was tuned and set up. They absolutely didn't.

Crescent Blues: How did you get involved in piping for the Dragoncon parade?

Janny Wurts: They asked me. They said they had this parade, and I said, "What good is a parade without bagpipes?" They said, you're here, giving a concert Saturday night, could you play Saturday morning? What was I going to say, no?

Crescent Blues: Anything else you'd like to add?

Janny Wurts: Not really. If anybody has any questions that aren't covered in this interview, they are more than welcome to look at my Web site. Email me a question. Just don't send me an attached file. If it's got a file attached, I'm going to throw it out.

Click here to read part one of the Crescent Blues interview with Janny Wurts.

Click here to learn more about Janny Wurts.

Jean Marie Ward & Teri Smith In addition to editing Crescent Blues, Jean Marie Ward writes for a number of Web-based and print magazines, including Science Fiction Weekly. She is the author of Illumina: the Art of Jean Pierre Targete (Paper Tiger) and several short stories, including "Most Dead Bodies in a Confined Space" in Strange Pleasures 2 (Prime Books). Her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with Teri Smith, was published by Samhain Publishing in 2007. Raising hell for fifty years from Alaska to the Azores and all points in between, Teri Smith was an Air Force brat who never stopped traveling. She was also a mother, a grandmother (of ten!), a help desk wizard, a financial assistant, acquisitions editor for Samhain Publishing and, most importantly, the Queen Nag of the Known Universe. A multi-published short story writer, her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with Jean Marie Ward, was published in 2007. Contrary to common belief, she never stopped living.