TAILCHASER'S SONG

TAILCHASER was my first book, in every possible way -- first I ever wrote, first I had published -- so it will always be close to my heart. I still marvel sometimes at all the places that imaginary cat has traveled -- far more than I'll ever get to, probably.

I wrote the book in part as therapy for the shock of living with cats for the first time. I had one particular cat, a splendid ginger (as they say in England -- we just say 'red' in the US) male named Fever. I could never get over the incredible scam he and the other cats had going. Dogs WORK for their living, fetching, guarding, wagging, drooling, making it clear how much they love humans. Cats think you should feel lucky to be slaving at a horrible job so you can buy them food. So I started playing with the idea of a cat-o-centric universe. How would they see things? What kind of stories and folktales would they have? What part would humans play? (Answer: Meal Ticket.)

The story came a few years later, when I first decided to try writing a novel. I'd written only one other original thing before that, a rather awful science-fiction screenplay called THE SAD MACHINES that I've never shown to anyone outside my family, I don't think. The only interesting thing about it now is that its main character, Ishmael Parks, was a definite precursor to Simon in the Osten Ard books.

Anyway, I wrote the cat book, sent it off to the first publisher on my list (who were at the time the best-known fantasy publishers in the US) and got it back promply with a rejection note that said "We don't do works with non-human protagonists." When I wrote back to have this curious sentence explained, they said: "We don't do animal books. We'd make an exception if this were a potential best-seller, but it isn't."

Ha ha, I can proudly say today. And again, Ha. (Not that I'm bitter. In fact, when TAILCHASER made the best-seller lists, I wrote the publishers who rejected it a very gracious and generous note, which I tied to a big rock and chucked through their lobby window. Just kidding.)

Anyway, the second publishers on the list, DAW Books, liked it and bought it, and they are still my primarypublishers (and friends) to this day.

I think there are a lot of themes that show up in TAILCHASER that are still strong in my work. The distrust of easy and or/dramatic solutions is one of them. The love for stories of the past, but also a certain skepticism about history, is another. And, most importantly, the need to learn about oneself, to find out who you are before you can expect to change things in this or any world, is something I still work with all the time, in my books and my life.

Last but not least, thematically-speaking, there are some little nods (and affectionate jabs) toward Tolkien. Like a lot of people my age, I was head-over-heels in love with THE LORD OF THE RINGS when I was younger, and still think it an amazing and wonderful book. But even something wonderful should still not be swallowed whole without critical examination, and eventually I wrote MEMORY, SORROW AND THORN in part to deal with some of my conflicts about Tolkien's LOTR (which I'll try to explain in more detail elsewhere). In TAILCHASER, I reserved my Tolkien commentary primarily to a few jokes, like the scene where Fritti meets the Queen of Cats (a fairly obvious Galadriel-parallel), the glorious and exalted Mirmirsor Sunback, and discovers her biting her butt. Which is, of course, a very catlike thing to do.

When I received the letter that DAW was going to publish TAILCHASER'S SONG back in January of 1985, it was one of the happiest and most exciting days of my life. I took my dog Gala (who was then a mere youngster) for a walk in the hills and imagined all the things that might happen now that I was officially a writer. And many -- no, most of them -- did. Thanks to that imaginary cat.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

In early 1985, the folks at DAW bought TAILCHASER. Once that contract was signed, they wanted to know what else I was working on. I told them (truthfully) that I had begun an Egyptian historical novel (tentatively called JACKAL EATS THE SUN.) They suggested that if I wanted to take advantage of the push I was going to receive in the fantasy market, I should consider writing another fantasy novel.

I said that I had always wanted to write a big epic fantasy, a la LORD OF THE RINGS, because I felt I had a lot of things to say about the genre and what had happened to it since commercial fantasy had come into existence. I both loved and hated the genre --loved it for what it could be when it was done well, hated how easily it could become formulaic "comfort reading". I wanted to take my own best shot. They thought it was a good idea, so I started working on what would eventually become MEMORY, SORROW, AND THORN.

I recently found some old notes while I was cleaning my office -- notes from before I started writing THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR. Simon, you may be interested to know, was originally going to be called "Martin". The Sithi were called the "Shee" (those of you versed in Celtic stuff can see where I eventually made it a little less straightforward, while still giving the nod to the original concept) and the Norns were called the "Dark Fay".

The ghants were originally "gaunts", skeletal, mud-like things, but that was too close to H. P. Lovecraft's night-gaunts, so the name changed and they evolved into crablike critters.

Binabik was originally "Bilabil" -- named in part after the Moorish folk-character "Boabdil" -but my editors thought it sounded too much like "Bilbo", so I changed that too. Josua was unnamed (this was an outline) but I was toying with "Jariah", "Jeriah", and "Jediah" for his name. I had at one point also thought of naming Camaris "Casimir", but had discarded that fairly early.

Anyway, despite eventually writing about a hundred pages of outline, there were a lot of things I didn't know when I started DRAGONBONE, and I just had to trust I would find out along the way. Lots of characters who eventually became very important didn't mean much to begin with -- Cadrach being a prime example. At first he was only going to be in the two early scenes with Simon, one at the Hayholt market and the other at the inn. But I brought him back, and then I asked myself who he was, and before long he was a major part of the story.

The problem with that kind of approach, of course, is that the first two volumes were already going to be in print by the time I was finishing the third, so if I did something wrong, or changed something after the fact, it was too late to go back and change it, as you could do before printing a standalone novel. So -- and this is a general tip useful to any people writing very long fiction -- I left some things open-ended in the first two volumes, so I could enforce a different interpretation once the book was in print, if necessary.

I never had any idea the books would be as long and complex as they turned out to be. I guess I should have figured it out when I wrote a hundred-page outline for what I thought was a single-volume novel.

Every book has a life of its own to the writer. The mental image I have for DRAGONBONE is of a guy setting out for an afternoon's hike carrying only his lunch, and then being stuck in the mountains for weeks, wishing he'd brought more with him than just a carton of yogurt and a sweater. That guy was me. I had NO IDEA how much work -- and how much time -- these books would demand. If you'd told me when I started writing the first paragraph of THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR that I wouldn't finish the story for eight years, I'd have thought you were absolutely barking mad.

STONE OF FAREWELL

Middle volumes are always a problem. (I'm going to have two middle volumes in OTHERLAND, so I'm in a cranky mood.) They're not the ending and they're not the beginning. Things have to happen, but nothing really resolves.

One of the things that kept me sane while writing STONE was that I'd never done it before. This was really only the third book of my career, so everything was pretty new, but the middle-volume problems in particular were happening to me for the first time. The other sanity-preserving factor was that I allowed things to develop on their own. The beginning and ending of my original outlines were pretty detailed, but I really hadn't had much idea of how I would get from the former to the latter. That meant I could just sort of follow the characters in STONE and see what developed, which meant it was almost as much of a surprise to me as it was to the readers.

I had no idea when I started that I would spend so much time in Yiqanuc. Neither did I know quite what was going to happen to the Lector, and how Miriamele's relationship with Cadrach would change during the course of this second volume. I certainly didn't know I would spend quite so much time in Jao e-Tinukai'i, either.

Writing Simon's trip to the home of the Sithi was actually one of the most enjoyable parts of STONE for me. I tried to pay a little bit of a tribute to Roger Zelazny's AMBER books in the actual journeying -- Aditu takes Simon through the Summer Gate by a process of shifting reality not unlike Corwin's first trip to Amber -- but still make that section my own, and for me, that and the first trip to the Yásira are among my favorite parts of the trilogy. Writing about immortal, alien characters is always difficult, so it was an entertaining challenge to try to make the Sithi seem genuinely different from humans.

I haven't looked at the book for a while, but just now I picked it up (to check the accent mark in "Yásira") and while browsing through saw lots of things I remembered fondly. I am still pleased with Josua's wedding and the escape from the Thrithings -- "I am married and an outlaw!" was always one of my favorite lines, if it's not too embarrassing to quote oneself -- and the incorporation of the famous old British legend, "King Alfred and the Cakes". And, of course, the horrible fate of Brother Hengfisk and the first sight of the ghants and the kilpa.

Someone once pointed out to me that many of my best monsters can be directly traced to my personal loathing of seafood.

In fact, it's funny: most of the people who like vast fantasies, and even a lot of the people who like mine, seem to enjoy the big sweeping stuff most -- battles, magic, things like that. But when I look at what I myself am proudest of, it's usually small stuff -- a nice turn of phrase, a touch of transcendence, a character who becomes suddenly real, or just a weird little idea that does nothing but sit in the middle of a chapter and make people stop and stare.

My very favorite moment of THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR, for example, is the part where Simon and Binabik are exploring the burned abbey, and Simon finds a bible (well, a Book of the Aedon) that belonged to one of the monks, and reads the inscription, then has a minor spiritual experience. But I'll bet ninety percent of the readers don't even notice that as they go past.

Ah, well. We writers are strange folk, anyway.

TO GREEN ANGEL TOWER

This book almost killed me. Many people have been amused at the reference to it as "The Book That Ate My Life" in the acknowledgements, but it was damn near true.

For one thing, I was already horribly behind schedule when I came to write it. We (my publishers and I) had originally planned that I would write one volume a year, so the contract that I signed in 1985 specified that the last book would be delivered in 1988. Well, by the time 1988 came around I hadn't even finished STONE. So I was something like two and a half years behind deadline before I even began TO GREEN ANGEL TOWER.

Then, it also coincided with a very difficult part of my life, where -- among other things -- my first marriage ended. I won't go into detail, but I was a mess, and just getting out of bed sometimes seemed beyond my strength, let alone one of the most complicated books written in the twentieth century.

Last but not least, I had set up a very complex story and promised to finish it in one more volume. Thus, TGAT (as my friends online came to call it, pronounced "Tee-gat") would prove to be ludicrously but terrifyingly long. When I finished it, the manuscript was 1600 pages, a stack of paper over a foot tall. (Most "literary" novels are between 150-250 pages in manuscript. Most "genre" novels are more like 400 or 500.) As readers know, it barely made it into hardcover binding, and was so large it had to be published in two volumes in paperback. In fact, people who've only seen M,S,&T in paperback often get confused when I refer to it as a "trilogy".

Despite all this, I desperately needed and wanted to finish the Osten Ard story. Not only for the sake of the readers who were asking "Where the hell is Volume Three?" but for myself. I had lived with the characters so long, while my own life was changing so much, that I needed to find out what happened and see it through. There were times I worried that I was punishing Simon in the final volume as a way of dealing with my own unhappiness and pain. I can only say in my defense that the original outline (done years earlier) had suggested that the last volume wouldn't a happy time for Simon, so his travails weren't only because of my own misery.

There were pleasures too, of course. You can't be as involved with a book as I was with TGAT and not feel good about some things. But it was also a very dark book as well. In fact, I've often been surprised when some readers talk about what they feel is too blithely happy an ending. Without giving things away for people who haven't read it yet, I can't comprehend seeing everything these characters go through, and tallying all the characters who don't make it, and thinking that things are all hunky-dory just because some survive.

I thought that the crucial messages of TGAT were actually pretty subtle and a touch depressing: that life can be unfair; that the only thing you can do when it knocks you down is get up; that some hurts never heal; that hatred and revenge are ultimately useless, but that resisting hatred and revenge doesn't mean you'll have a personal happy ending, either. (The list of good, decent folk killed off in the trilogy would fill a page.)

Besides, an epic has a certain, time-tested form, and I was trying to write an epic. I suppose I could have had Simon fall downstairs at the end and break his neck, or get eaten by rabid badgers or something, which would have satisfied a certain sort of critic, but I think it would have been a dreadful thing to do to readers who had just finished reading a million words, waiting to find out Simon's ultimate fate.

(Admittedly, the ending of TGAT could have been worse. My joke to my friends during the darkest days of The Endless Manuscript was that I had decided to go with the "Everybody Dies" ending just to simplify things.)

A question I frequently get asked about TGAT is what people perceive as my preparing a sequel -- that matter of a certain pair of children. I deliberately put those children and that prophesy in the book, NOT to pave the way for a sequel but to show that Osten Ard is not the kind of place where the magic and strangeness suddenly stops just because this particular adventure has ended.

(It's always been one of my pet peeves -- fantasy worlds that seem to be completely static until everything swirls into chaos during the time the novel describes, then drop back into complete stasis again when the story ends.)

It's hard for me to say anything very clever about TGAT. It was the ending of what -- at least until I finish OTHERLAND, I hope -- has been the main creative achievment of my life. Like I said, it almost killed me. But I also feel like I took responsibility for a world and for a lot of people in it, and gave those characters and their world respect, and paid attention to what happened to all of them, and allowed each one the room to have his or her own story. Yeah, it took me 1600 pages to finish the thing off, each page metaphorically covered in my own blood, but I wouldn't take a single one of them back now.

Well, I suppose I wouldn't mind having some of that blood back . . .

CHILD OF AN ANCIENT CITY

CHILD OF AN ANCIENT CITY, which I will hereafter shorten to "CHILD" for the sake of not giving myself typing-finger-spasms, was originally a longish short story for WEIRD TALES Magazine. Actually, before that, it was a story set at the end of one of the later Crusades, after the Battle of Nicopolis, when the European crusaders got their butts radically kicked by the Sultan Bazajet, but I was invited to contribute a story to an Arabian Knights anthology, so I changed the setting. The original characters being stalker through the mountains by a vampire were French crusaders.

The story got too long for the anthology, so WEIRD TALES got it instead. Then, a few years later, I was approached about turning it into a short novel. I was very busy already with the trilogy, so when I was offered a collaborator I said I'd think about it. When Nina Kiriki Hoffman offered to be that collaborator, I said yes immediately. Nina is a wonderful writer, and I suggest you find something by her immediately and read it (her novel, THE THREAD THAT BINDS THE BONES might be a good place to start.)

Nina and I worked out what we wanted to put in the story to make it larger, which mostly consisted of writing more stories-within-the-story, and expanding some of the parts that were glossed over in the original version, like the attack by the bandits. Then Nina wrote a draft, I re-wrote, and we continued to go back and forth until we were satisfied.

To answer an often-asked question, the Richard Burton to whom the book is dedicated is NOT the actor who was married to Elizabeth Taylor, but the 19th century explorer and man of letters. If you want to find out what a fascinating life is truly like, crazier and more interesting than any fiction, go find a biography of Richard Burton. He well cool.

Some people haven't read CHILD just because it's very short, and certainly the type on some editions is very large to make it seem longer, but I think in both story-length and short-novel versions it's worth reading. It's not really about vampires, or crusades, or anything like that -- it's about story-telling, which is my favorite thing in all the world.

CALIBAN'S HOUR

This is another one that it's hard to say anything clear about, since it was both very personal and very disappointing (at least in the sense that I didn't think it ever got the attention it deserved, compared to the trilogy.)

The idea was hatched in a long-ago meeting with my British publisher, who is now my wife, and the ideas of separation and distance in it are very intertwined with a strange time in my life when things were changing.

The story itself came from my frustration with Shakespeare, since not only was the monster Caliban of THE TEMPEST fully within his rights (it WAS his island before Prospero showed up) but his fate was never given any attention at the end of the play. Did he go back with Prospero? Was he left alone on the island? I decided to try to answer some of these questions.

I also thought when I began the story that it was about colonialism, about the now very old-fashioned idea that one group of people has a responsibility (and a right) to take control of another group. And CALIBAN'S HOUR is indeed about that, but story-themes are slippery things. As I wrote it, it became much more a story about love and betrayal and language and childhood.

I don't know whether we didn't market the book properly (I was never nuts about the cover in either the American or British editions) or whether readers don't want short books from me (which would be a shame, since I will continue to up with stories that don't want to be long books) or whether I just didn't write as interesting a book as some of my others.

I have trouble believing the last one, since it meant so much to me when I was writing it. The people who've written to me about it didn't seem to feel that way either.

HOUR is also significant because it's the first time in well over a decade that any of my artwork has appeared in a commercial publication. It was great fun doing the drawings, although by the time I felt comfortable drawing again, I had just finished the last of the illustrations. Then I wanted to start all over and be more experimental, but it was too late, and publication was looming.

One of the things that I like best about HOUR is that the whole of the action of THE TEMPEST, the play that inspired it, takes place in only a few pages near the end.

Another thing I like is the possibility that someone who had never read or seen the play might read this book and then be drawn to Shakespeare's masterwork. That would give me a very satisfying feeling of having paid a little bit back to the debt all modern writers owe the Big Guy from Avon.

CITY OF GOLDEN SHADOW

What can I say? Starting a new book is like falling in love. You live and breathe that story, you find it hard to think about anything else, and all the other books in your past begin to look kind of frumpy by comparison.

OTHERLAND began as an idle thought while I was driving around one day back in about 1989. (I was still in the middle of the trilogy, writing-wise.) So many wonderful books, I thought, are river novels -- HEART OF DARKNESS, HUCKLEBERRY FINN. (In fact, science fiction writers have noticed this before me. Both Philip Jose Farmer's TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO and Dan Simmons' HYPERION have strong river-novel elements in them, just to name a couple.)

The rivers in novels are metaphors, of course -- metaphors for the journey of life, for the exploration of the self -- but, I wondered, had anyone ever written a novel where the river itself was completely metaphorical?

It wasn't a long jump to thinking of a river of pure information, and the original title for OTHERLAND was NORTH ON THE DATA STREAM.

I combined this idea of an imaginary river with my interest in how information culture is changing the world (and yet leaving many of the same imbalances between the poor and the rich) and began to think about characters.

Writing OTHERLAND, at least the first volume, has been different than writing MS&T, both more frustrating and more satisfying.

It's more frustrating in part because it's set in the near future, so I can't just arbitrarily make things up, and even the things that take place in computer-created virtual worlds are sometimes exact copies of real things. (I had to read over a dozen long books and many other bits of source material just to write the Foreword.) If I'm showing the readers a place they know (parts of the book take place in California, North Carolina, South Africa, Colombia, Australia, India - all very real places) then even fifty years or so in the future it has to be very recognizably the same spot.

On the other hand, one of the wonderful things about OTHERLAND is that I get to use modern language. I've always believed that when you write immersive fantasy, you don't use metaphors even in narration that the characters wouldn't know -- "electric" in a medieval-ish period, for instance -- because it jerks the readers out of the story and into the present. But with this book I can do what I want, and use a palette of words much closer to my everyday way of speaking and thinking.

I've also enjoyed it because I'm giving myself as wide a range of characters (some human, some not) as I did in the trilogy. And I still get to indulge in my standard hideously complicated plot, zillions of connecting strands, squillions of foreshadowings, and tons of bizarre side-tangents and weird supporting personae.

So far my only real unhappiness about the book is that, since it's going to be four volumes, there are going to be TWO middle books. Gack. No one sensible likes to write middle books.

But the best thing about OTHERLAND is that between the global span of the plot, and the Otherland network itself -- a tremendously powerful and realistic simulation network, where computers can create any environment or characters conceivable -- I can make ANYTHING happen. Just in the first volume, I get to put my characters in the real-world places mentioned above, AND:

- World War One
- Alice's Wonderland
- A 19th century science-fiction version of Mars
- The Ice Age
- An imaginary America without Europeans
- The Machine-Giant's Castle in the Clouds
- A land of Monster-sized Insects
- The heaven of Ancient Egypt
- The world's largest and most terrifying virtual night club

....and others I don't have time to list.

Next volume -- who knows? The Trojan War? Camelot? Ragnarok? Pee Wee's Playhouse?

God, I'm having fun.

RIVER OF BLUE FIRE

In many ways, RoBF was the most difficult book in my writing career. I make it an article of faith to challenge myself, which is why I don't tend to do the same thing twice in a row, and OTHERLAND as a whole has been a big jump forward in complexity and (I think) subtlety. It also has the added challenge of being science-fiction, which disallows the, "Well, it's magic," defense for plot incongruities or excessive usages of the deus ex machina.

And, as I'm always whining about, it was also a middle book. There are actually TWO middle books in this story, since I've decided to treat it as four to begin with (as opposed to writing a ridiculously long final volume as I did with MS&T) but the third volume of OTHERLAND, MOUNTAIN OF BLACK GLASS -- which I'm in the middle of as of this writing -- will have fewer middle-book features. Some things will actually get resolved, for instance.

So RoBF was a challenge of an entirely different order to any I'd had before, a middle book without the more obvious conventions of epic fantasy to reassure the reader, and with a storyline that was even more complicated (and in some cases deliberately mystifying) than that of MS&T (which was already quite complicated enough for most people, thank you very much.) And all this without having the props of a true beginning or a real ending. Tough work.

That said, though, it was also a tremendously enjoyable book to write. The chance to explore the Otherland network in some depth was really exciting, especially since the scope for ideas allowed by the network was what got me excited about the project in the first place. Also, I think I had a chance to bring a particular skill of mine into play, combining my slightly odd sense of humor with scary stuff -- sometimes making some rather unusual combinations. In fact, I don't think I've ever let my joy in the absurd run quite so far in any of my previous novels -- normally it's been confined to short stories, or the occasional farcical character, like Lenti in the MS&T books. And I liked doing it a lot. A sense of humor has always been a big part of what I create and who I am.

Also, I enjoyed trying to develop themes for the book that would arise out of the material, instead of being laid out for the readers in marked-out areas -- that is, to allow the material itself to create thematic moments (of unreality, of fears about mortality, of what it means to be human) rather than to have characters simply talk about the issues.

Again, it's a way of challenging the readers. I think there are big issues in the OTHERLAND books -- as big as issues get -- but I want people to find them for themselves, or even ignore them if they want. I want this story to feel as big and confusing and fascinating as life itself.

So, did I succeed? Who knows? I've done my best, and I have to leave everything else to the readers to decide. I will say that the mail and reviews have been very gratifying, which suggests that I'm at least on the right track. Our genre, SF and Fantasy, can be glorious when it's done right -- of course, it can also be petty and formulaic when it's done just to fill a market niche. A four-book contract is a wonderful chance to try to do something big and different, a chance many writers never get. It would be a shame to waste that potential.

MOUNTAIN OF BLACK GLASS

As I write this piece about Mountain of Black Glass for the website, I'm still trying to find a healthy stance for writing about my own books - specifically this sort of behind-the-scenes stuff - without being either irritatingly self-satisfied or cloyingly self-deprecatory. The simple fact is, no one writes two or three thousand pages of story without thinking they've got a story worth telling. No one makes a living from writing without having at least a little confidence in what they do. Do I think I'm the best writer who ever lived? God, no. Do I think I'm worth reading? Yeah, of course - unless at one of the readerly extremes, either the kind of person who can only stomach Reader's Digest lost-puppy-on-Christmas-Eve stories and anything less formulaic makes you unhappy and sad, or a resident of that critical cloud-cuckoo-land that can't stand a story intended in large part to entertain an audience.

With the third volume finished, I can finally look down the mountain and see that eventually - barring someone dropping a piano out of a cargo plane when I happen to be walking underneath - I will finish the OTHERLAND story. Some things will not be as wonderful as I'd envisioned, of course (that's the sad fact of writing: your best hope of what something can be doesn't always make it to paper), but other elements have come as happy surprises, and nobody sensible is allergic to serendipity.

The main thing, however, is that I can now sense the time coming when I can tell people, "Like it or not, it's all finished and you can react to it as a whole." I think only people who create extended works that come out in increments can appreciate how frustrating it is - in my case, wanting people to see where something's ultimately going, how -this- fits into -that-, but knowing it will be a year or two before you even write that section, then another year before any normal readers will see it.

(No, I don't mean to imply that there are some kind of -abnormal- readers out there are receiving my books telepathically as I write them, just that I have a few close friends and editors who read the book before it's published.)

But a multi-volume story is still a story, no matter how long it takes to produce, and I'm still a storyteller at heart. Many elements have been planned since before I wrote the first word, so it's always difficult to choke back my reactions when people are talking about the book, even when they are saying (thank you) kind and wonderful things. "But wait!" I want to cry. "You haven't seen anything yet! See, that only -looks- like . . ." But of course I can't tell them that, because then their quite sensible response will be either, "Don't spoil it for us!" or "We'll read it when you publish it, so shut up and write."

It's wonderful and exciting to be past the halfway point of OTHERLAND, and even none of the major plotlines is resolved in any ordinary sense at the end of this volume, I think people will finally begin to see some of the veiled shapes of the resolutions to come - that in the ending of the third book, they will intuit some (but not all, I promise) of the twists and turns the characters will experience before the end of things.

Musing about extended novels aside, Mountain of Black Glass was in many ways the easiest of the books to write, since by this point the story had a great deal of momentum. (Well, -I- thought it did, anyway. Your mileage may vary...) I also got to work in a few more obsessions of my own, which has been the largest fun of working with the OTHERLAND idea - it's the ultimate kitchen sink novel: everything a might imagine can be used within the concept, so the only requirement is to make that idea or event or character worth reading about.

Anyway, I had fun writing it. I hope you'll have fun reading it. I hope the thought-provoking stuff actually provokes, and the scary stuff makes you turn the rest of the lights on when you're reading at night. And, of course, I hope it makes you eager for the last volume and answers to all the story's many mysteries. I can promise you with complete sincerity that I'm looking forward to that, too.

SEA OF SILVER LIGHT

It's finally over. Five or six years of writing, perhaps more, living with this story for a few years in my head even before I started, and now it's about to be published. Characters I have lived with longer than I've lived with either of my children. (And who have been more of a plus in terms of income, as well.) All finished. If they lived, they lived. If they died, they died. Too late to change anything now. Am I happy with it? Yes, delirious, of course, thrilled to be finished, and proud of how much of it came out. Does that mean it's time to celebrate the end of many years of hard and loving labor? You'd think so, wouldn't you? But the end of one of these multivolume, multiyear odysseys is never really very satisfying, because it doesn't really come to a clean stop.

After months and months of writing you finish the first draft, which is more or less where you actually leave the characters behind as living creations, but you still have to do rewrites so you can't celebrate yet.

You do your second, third, whatever number of drafts, and when you get to the last one, well, in a sense that seems like it's really it, because the book is all but finished. You've worked and polished it. If it was a statue for the town square, you could put it up on its pedestal and let the pigeons start doing their jobs. But you can't really celebrate, because you still have to do the proofs.

So then the printed proofs show up in the mail, and in a way the book comes alive again, because you're seeing it typeset, which can be both nice and not-so-nice. Nice, because it feels official-so much more bookish in appearance than your raw manuscript. Not-so-nice, because all of a sudden things read a little differently, just for being on a differently-shaped page and in a different kind of typeface. Some effects disappear. Page breaks become awkward in a way you didn't notice in your manuscript. Anyway, you read and edit all those typeset proofs and then you send it back, thinking "Now it's truly finished. Time to celebrate!" But of course, there's still a bunch of other sidereal material to be dealt with-sometimes even to be inserted into the typeset proofs you've already corrected. Or just more material related to the book, like this thing you're reading now, which I'm writing two full weeks after the proofs have gone back to my publishers, but a couple of months before the book is actually published. So am I done now? I'm not quite sure.

In fact, until other human beings are actually reading the book and reacting to it, I probably will still feel there's some part of the process unfinished.

One major reason is that by the time I've done all the rewrites and corrected the proofs, I've read this book about six times in four months-all 1100 pages of manuscript. I'm completely sick of it. I have no idea if it's any good or not. I need someone else to tell me, because as far as I'm personally concerned, it's the most boring, unnecessary book in the history of this part of the galaxy. If I never had to look at it again I'd be perfectly happy-no, delighted. Of course, I'm desperately hoping that there are readers out there who will feel differently.

So maybe I'll have to wait until I start getting letters and emails saying things like, "Hey, Williams, your fourth book really suctions," or the more pleasant, "Just read the last OTHERLAND, and I really thought it was interesting how you blew up (character X) and didn't blow up (character Y), and especially how you only sort-of blew up (character Z)..." Then perhaps the process will feel complete and I can take my family out to dinner somewhere (these days, it's probably going to be a restaurant that provides toys with the children's meals) and say, "Well, Daddy finally finished his book."

To which my children, or at least the one who can already talk, will of course say, That's nice, Daddy. What book?"

Tad Williams

February 2001