Look at the headbumps, the rubbing, the goofery. These guys enjoy each other.
…Not Voldemort, of course. I harbor a certain sneaking affection for a villain who manages to get so much done without a nose, and who has exploited for his benefit a folkloric trope* that the Lone Power (and many another otherworldly archvillain) has used before him: of being one who shouldn’t be named, because the naming either draws the attention of the named, or lends them power.**
Today, though, I’m talking about the man who has just now wrought so much straightforward evil in Norway. Even someone good with words would correctly find themselves struggling to find anything that would come even close to conveying the pain being suffered right now by the relatives of all the people killed by the bomb in Oslo or hunted down and shot on that little island — or any vocabulary sufficient to express the anguish that the survivors are going through right now. Many of them are waking up from surgery for multiple gunshot wounds inflicted on them by someone who purposely chose rounds that would do the most damage — and every one of them, as was reported by a Norwegian surgeon I just saw interviewed, is desperately trying to get to grips with what’s happened to them as soon as they regain consciousness: asking about friends, trying to understand what the hell just happened. I feel as much for my medical and nursing colleagues there as for their patients. This is a terrible time for all of them.
The most annoying part of all this for me — I say nothing of the tragic results of what seems to be a very well-integrated delusional system constructed over the guts of a decade — is that the man is going to get at least some of what he wants: notoriety. “This is the beginning of the propaganda phase,” he wrote. Nor will it have been all about “saving Europe”, despite his protestations. Implicit in his manifesto, implicit in the part where he says (I paraphrase) that sixty years from now “we’ll all be seen as heroes” — is that he expects to be and looks forward to being famous because of what he’s done.
God, I wish that could be stopped.
I know that we’re in the modern media age, and that — as Peter just said, wandering through the room and glancing in disdain at a passing TV image of the guy in his fancy made-up Knights Templar “uniform” all covered with braid and ribbons for awards that don’t exist — “It’s too late now: the genie is out of the bottle.” Agreed, of course. But still…
A little earlier, I saw one of the Sky news people, one who normally might have known better, interviewing one of the survivors, a remarkably put-together and well-spoken young gentleman, and trying to draw him out on “how he felt about the attacker”. The young gent, who had visibly been struggling with his emotions while trying to answer the interviewer’s questions, became vehement for just that moment: “I don’t want to think about him,” he said (I’m paraphrasing here as closely as I can). “I wish people wouldn’t be spending so much time thinking about him, talking about him: we should be talking about the people he’s hurt and killed.” The newsreader promptly and wisely went off in another direction with the interview, sounding a bit at a loss (and also sounding, to his credit, a little embarrassed at the rebuke).
…Yesterday at least the murderer didn’t get the platform he wanted, his arraignment being held in camera, sans any uniforms, and the judge apparently giving the man’s desire to explain himself the absolute minimum shrift. Of course, the guy will now console himself with the thought of the trial to come, where his platform will be exposed to the world in all its squalid detail for entirely too long. If there is justice, he will be locked up for way longer than he would have thought possible. (This is already looking likely, as apparently the charge of “crimes against humanity” is being considered, and no way they’re going to put him away for just 20-30 years for that. )
Yet wouldn’t it be wonderful if he could get the absolute minimum of attention as the trial goes forward? Yes, yes, I know the more sensational press will insist on playing it for maximum effect. But in some other world… we could invoke Herostratus’s Law, and hear as little about this guy’s forthcoming attempted grandstanding as possible.
Never heard of Herostratus? Isn’t that wonderful? That was how it was supposed to work. …Unfortunately one source broke the reporting boycott: otherwise nobody would know.
Herostratus was a glory hound who lived in the fourth century BC. Apparently not being famous really annoyed him, and so on July 21, 356 BC, he did something horrific. He sneaked into the great and beautiful Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, in what is now Turkey — one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world — and set the place on fire. The building was almost completely destroyed. When the authorities got hold of Herostratus and asked him what on Earth had possessed him, he replied that he’d taken this action specifically so that he would be remembered forever.
On hearing this, the government did two things. They executed him immediately, and then — with an eye to frustrating his desire — they made speaking his name or writing about him a capital offense.
This was surprisingly effective for some time. Unfortunately there’s always somebody who decides to thumb his nose at the Establishment. In this case it was the controversial historian Theopompos, a writer with a gift for sucking up to the powerful (most famously Alexander the Great) and accused by his contemporaries of being a scandalmonger way more interested in his own personal fame than the rights and wrongs of the history he was supposed to be reporting. Theopompos apparently reckoned that he was out of reach of the Ephesians, and spilled the beans in his Hellenics. The main result of this was to associate Herostratus’s name with a single concept: the commission of dreadful crimes for the sake of notoriety.
Anyway: this is a world a long ways in time away from that one, and obviously no such thing will happen to the man now sitting in solitary. In the meantime, the coming days are going to be painful enough as more of the details of the dead and the suffering living come out. But, whatever the media may do, no one will be hearing that one’s name from me. Now or ever.
*I think it’s probably here in the A500’s somewhere. Sorry I can’t link directly to it, as the Stith-Thompson Motif Index is one of the storyteller’s great friends.
**…It has to be said, though, that the Lone One — should he and Voldemort ever have met, say over dinner — would have been capable of dealing with Voldy between the amuses-bouches and the appetizer, and then would probably have asked to see the wine list one more time.
Work day, busy busy. But first:
At the Ebooks Direct store we now have Microsoft Reader versions (the .lit format) of The Door into Fire, The Door into Shadow, The Door into Sunset, and the Tale of the Five Omnibus. (I was holding off on the conversion to .lit because I didn’t have the reader and wasn’t sure how they’d convert. Seems they look OK, so here they are.) Just use the pulldown menu on each page and the .lit version will reveal itself. …We’ll start rolling out .lit versions of the Young Wizards international editions and the various other books shortly. Also: in couple of weeks we’ll be putting up the revised edition of Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, with a cover that more accurately supports its identity as an urban-fantasy police procedural (yes, with a love interest, but what do you call Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle, then? Chopped liver?).
BTW, Microsoft: what is this dumb stunt of emailing me a video about “how the Declaration of Independence would have looked if the Founding Fathers had had Word”? They had something way better than Word, people. They had the words. Here are a few of them for you: Consanguinity. Usurpations. Conjured. Despotism. Inestimable. Perfidy. And possibly the best one in that document: Unalienable. …Seriously, someone over there must have sent that email out before their blood caffeine level got high enough for them to realize how witless it would look in retrospect.
And by the way: WIL WHEATON IS NOT A DICK. Pass it on. (frowning at some people’s behavior) Seriously: there’s no excuse for it. And it doesn’t have to be like that. I remember how when George Takei came out for a Trek/media convention in Dublin some years back, he was briefly astounded at not being dogpiled at breakfast even though he was surrounded by a breakfast room full of eager fans. It was explained to him that nobody was going to bother him as long as he was obviously eating and reading his newspaper. When he stopped one or both of those behaviors, then people would approach him. And that’s just how it happened, though he wasn’t mobbed then, either: folks came up and visited him by ones and twos and threes at decent intervals. …A pity this kind of behavior can’t spread westward. In any case, Wil did exactly right. And good on Felicia for having been proactive.
Meanwhile: the main Young Wizards website has had a makeover. There may be a few pages that haven’t been optimized for the new layout yet (mostly in terms of images having their background colors changed, etc.) but Lee the Web Lady will hunt them down and sort them out over the next couple of days. Final issue: how to get the slider to fade rather than slide, if possible. (Probably some fiddly little jQuery thing. To be handled sooner or later…)
And finally: the Door into Starlight issue — bumping this a bit so that I can be sure everybody interested has had a chance to respond. If you’ve seen it already, apologies: please ignore it. (And thanks again to all those who have responded.) If you haven’t, leave a note in the comments, or Tweet with a link to the original message, or share it on G+ or Facebook. Thanks!
First thing this morning, as usual, I fumbled around on the bedside table and grabbed for the smartphone to see what interesting things had happened while I was asleep. And there in the shiny new Google+ app (thank you Colm!) what do I see, in reaction to the notification about the upload of the new edition of the Middle Kingdoms omnibus yesterday, but:
“Were there any more books in the series planned? I remember reading these three several years ago and thinking the last one felt a little incomplete.”
“Now that someone else started it (cough) A Door into Starlight please?(cough)”
And on Twitter:
“Speaking of which, is The Door into Starlight still under construction or did it get abandoned?”
“The Door Into Starlight is the book I’ve been anticipating most for the longest. Every time you mention Middle Kingdoms I get giddy!”
…And I lay there in bed for a while (assisted by the excellent Cat Goodman, who came to help with my cogitations by lying on my chest and digging his claws in just above my collarbones… I swear, I think sometimes that cat distrusts gravity…) and started composing possible responses, each one of which I immediately virtually tore up on the grounds that I hadn’t yet had any caffeine.
I’ve had the caffeine now (and am also considering some Malt-O-Meal, as it’s a July morning afternoon in Ireland and the local temperature’s about what it would be in the Alps in April). So I’m in a better place to deal with the question. It is, after all, one I get occasionally at US conventions (and in the past, at some of the UK ones). Somebody will corner me in the bar, or after a panel, and say:
“What about The Door into Starlight? It’s been more than twenty years since the series started.”
“Yes indeed, it has. In fact, it’s been more than thirty, but who’s counting?”
“So where is it already?”
“It’s in progress, and I work on it now and then. I have a lot of scattered bits and pieces of it, with a lot of huge empty gaps between them that need to be filled in so that the whole thing works. As I’ve said before: I know how it starts, and I know how it ends – I have done since I finished The Door into Fire. But oy, the middle! …In the meantime, since my family would not appreciate starving for my art, I do other work as well. Other books, the occasional movie. Starlight I’ll get around to again when I have the inclination and the leisure.” And there has been an additional reason for the non-completion lurking in the background, but mostly I don’t introduce that into these conversations.
Most of the time the questioning stops here, and people change the subject and go off to do something else, like abuse George R.R. Martin about A Dance with Dragons. (And here I pause to wave at George, who I’ve known for a long time, and grin. How satisfying this week must be for him [setting aside the way Amazon.de did a whoopsie with the book’s shipment embargo]. Yet at the same time, the fans will be screaming at George for the next one within hours, if not minutes. Such is the writer’s life.)
Yet as regards Starlight, the questions have been getting a little more persistent lately. Could it possibly be because I’ll be turning 60 shortly? 🙂 (And to the person who Tweeted me a month or so back in the wake of the European E. coli outbreak, telling me to please write Starlight before I died, and then hastily erased the message? Whoops, I saw it first! And no, you weren’t just kidding: I know the signs. You think I didn’t have such thoughts about George McDonald Fraser and the specific Flashman books I wished to God he would get on with before he expired? But under no circumstances whatsoever would I ever had said as much to the man. Tsk, tsk! Anyway, I forgive you.)
Let me assure everybody that it is my intention to write The Door into Starlight before I die. Mostly for the good and sufficient reason that I said I would. But I’ve been in no particular hurry about it, as there has been a dirty secret in the way, one that’s kept me from making more of an effort to find the time to finish the last book in this series. And it’s this:
These books have never sold all that well, suggesting that not that many people are interested in reading the last one.
If there’s a more painful admission for a professional writer to make, I’m not sure what it would be. Deep down I suspect most of us wish that everything we write could be a vast worldwide hit and that people would climb over one another’s bodies to get at them. But it doesn’t usually work out that way. And although the Middle Kingdoms universe was my first one, and a place I love dearly, the numbers suggest that those who share the love are (in the publishing sense) relatively few. This truth doesn’t cripple me. A series set in a quasi-medieval alternate Earth with a kinda-pansexual culture was always going to be aimed at a rather niche market.
And another aspect of this truth is that the series has never done all that well in sales in any of its editions. Fire earned out, but paid royalties (in its various US editions) for only a couple/few years, then went out of print when Dell SF went under. Shadow came into print, earned out and paid maybe a couple of years’ worth of royalties, then went OOP as well. And if I remember correctly, Sunset never earned out on either side of the Atlantic. (All the books came into print at one time in the UK as part of a deal with Transworld/Corgi in the 90’s, but they didn’t fare well there either. All went OOP in short order, though there were complicating factors in that the books lost their Corgi editors early on — said editors leaving the publisher to go freelance. A book without an in-house editor to shepherd it through the pre-sales process tends not to do well, and these, unfortunately, were no exception.)
…Anyway, you see how this is going? If this trend was to continue, then if I did write Starlight, I’d probably have to pay people to read it.
🙂 …Okay, maybe that was facetious. But the sales record cannot be ignored. The last publisher to be interested in the series was Meisha Merlin: we did indeed have an agreement to publish Starlight, for a very small advance, and I restarted work on it. But then MM sadly went under. And when I next discussed the question of Starlight with my agent, a year or so after the fact, he told me gently that after inquiries, no other publisher had any interest whatsoever in the fourth book (because publishing the last book of an OOP series is almost never done). So I should set the idea aside and turn my attention to other things.
So the only other way for this book to see the light of day is through self-publication. Yes, certainly the self-pub model has changed very significantly in the last couple years. (And to this I say HURRAY for the new options it offers both the beginning writer and the established one.) But it nonetheless brings with it a new set of unknowns. And though those who contact me about The Door into Starlight without a shadow of a doubt really want to see it, I have to consider the situation with a cold eye, because it’s possible that their message, however heartfelt, nonetheless translates at this end as, “We want you to sit down and spend hundreds of hours of your (theoretically) paying writing time on something that will make us very happy but may never pay you even minimum wage.”
Am I wrong about this?
If I am, give me a sign.
(ETA 6 Nov 2016: As mentioned above, the social-media-sourced interest-gauging effort that previously followed the above request is long over, and has been removed. However: Part of it involved a 15%-off discount at Ebooks Direct, using the discount code STARLIGHTGUILT, which those interested could use to (a) get a price break on ebooks and (b) while doing so, send the author a fairly concrete message conveying their interest in TDIStarlight. This code has been reinstated and can now again be used by those interested for all purchases in the store, even in conjunction with other sale offers ([as long as those don’t also involve codes: the store can’t handle two codes in a transaction.] So knock yourselves out.) 🙂
…So let’s see what happens. Meanwhile, I’m going to go off and see about that Malt-O-Meal.
Five years later, in 2016: Time to make a choice, I’d say.
Having had a good many months to consider the (fairly positive) response to the above post, and (finally) being at a point in my general work schedule where it’s become realistic to start moving forward, I’ve moved The Door Into Starlight onto my formal work schedule. Please note that I will from this point on be making only general statements about progress — don’t expect word counts or bar graphs. I will not discuss any dates until I have a completed first draft in hand and have had time to talk to my agent about where to go next. So wish me luck… if there is any such thing. 🙂
Meanwhile, this is the page at MiddleKingdoms.com to watch for further news on this subject. (It also contains links for various mailing lists you can sign up to if you’re interested in receiving periodic newsletters on progress,)
…Thanks, all.
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For those of you who may have visited the Ebooks Direct store to pick up .epub or Kindle / .mobi copies of the omnibus containing all three Middle Kingdoms books (The Door into Fire, The Door into Shadow and The Door into Sunset), we’ve just finished reformatting the original editions to add better chapter breaks and other formatting.
The system has sent out emails with new download links to everyone who purchased the initial version of the ebook, in either format. We just thought it would be a good idea to mention it here as well, in case any of the emails accidentally wind up in people’s spam filters.
If you’ve been thinking about picking up a copy of the Omnibus ebook, this is a great time to do it, as we’re having a 20%-off-everything sale at the Ebooks Direct store at the moment. Click here for the book’s product page, and then use the coupon code DDCOM during checkout to get 20% off the Omnibus and anything else you purchase from the store. (If you want to see how our checkout works when you’re using a discount code, it’s all explained here.)
(PS: if you bought a copy of the Omnibus from the old Zen Cart store, we’ll be putting copies of the book there as well early next week, and regenerating everyone’s download links.)
Thanks, everybody!
…about what’s going on at the moment*. I mean of course the Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, Jonathan Swift — that perfect raconteur, columnist, satirist without peer, and celebrated man of letters of his busy century. He would, I bet, have serious words to say about the last week’s news. Maybe the political establishment of That Other Island should count itself lucky that the man himself is a long time now very much elsewhere — the part of him that mattered ideally being (as it says on the stone in the Cathedral ) “where savage indignation can no longer tear at his heart.”
…What brought on this tangent of thought is that Peter has been reading Mistress Masham’s Repose (surprising me a little that this was just happening now: he’d long since read most everything else T.H. White has written, I’d have thought).
It’s a proto-early-YA novel of a very perfect kind — based in a way on Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and purporting to explain some of the truths that the Dean was forced to hide when telling that story. Some of the book’s best parts revolve around White’s clear appreciation of the fact that Gulliver was never meant to be a children’s book — though like much older literature it’s been shoved off into that category, the way other sophisticated literature of earlier times often has been. (It was either Tolkien or Lewis, I forget which, who described this process as being like the way the grownups’ furniture gets exiled to the nursery or the children’s wing when it falls out of fashion.) And neither, when you come right down to it, is Masham’s intended just for kids. (No way they’d ever get all the jokes in there, for one thing.)
There’s one point in Mistress Masham’s Repose where the young girl Maria, who’s been working with the descendants of the unwillingly transported survivors of Lilliput, is talking to her friend the slightly dotty Professor about the silliness of some of the inhabitants of Laputa as described by Swift. “Look at the [scientist] who wanted to get sunbeams out of cucumbers!”
The Professor’s response is straightforward: “Why not? He was only a little before his time. What about cod liver oil and vitamins and all that? We will be getting sunbeams out of cucumbers before we know where we are.” And as Maria reacts to this, the Professor sits down and goes on:
“I think that Dr. Swift was a little foolish… to make fun of people just because they think. There are ninety thousand people in this world who do not think for every one who does, and those people hate the thinkers like poison. …You see, this world is run by ‘practical’ people: that is to say, by people who do not know how to think, have never had any education in thinking, and who do not wish to have it. They get on far better with lies, tub-thumping, swindling, vote-catching, murdering, and the rest of practical politics. So when a person who can think does come along, to tell them what they are doing wrong, or how to put it right, they have to invent some way of slinging mud at him, for fear of losing their power and being forced to do the right thing. So they always screech out with one accord that the advice of this thinker is ‘visionary’, ‘unpractical’, or ‘all right in theory’. Then, when they have discredited his piece of truth with the trick of words, they can settle down to blacken his character in other ways, at leisure, and they are safe to carry on with the wars and miseries which are the result of practical politics. I do not believe that a thinking man like Dr. Swift ought to have helped the practical politicians by poking fun at thinkers, even if he only meant to make fun of the silly ones. Time is revenging itself upon the Dean…”
And so it may be. In any case you could almost wish he was walking the streets of Dublin again and able to tell us — in that so-elegant and occasionally so-vicious prose of his — what he thought of the whole News of the World business, and a business culture in which tabloid employees — I can’t bring myself to characterize the people in question as “journalists” — happily blag their way into the voicemail boxes of grieving parents and kidnapped children for concrete evidence of their suffering that can be exploited to make money.
I wouldn’t be one for believing in mediums — I feel pretty strongly as a rule that the advice of the dead would not be much good to the living. But just this once, if the Powers that Be should authorize it from above, and some speaker-for-the-dead could get in touch with the immortal part of the man who wrote A Modest Proposal, and turn him loose in print on the politicians who have so long suffered one man and his love of money and power to run roughshod over the political process in the United Kingdom and the USA — boy, would that ever be a newspaper I’d buy.
*ETA: Link leads to the Telegraph’s timeline of the UK phone hacking scandal of 2010-12. When this post was written in 2011, the action was seriously heating up, as the timeline will show.
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(Edited to add: The files for The Door into Shadow and The Door Into Sunset at the store have also now been updated and notifications sent out).
The three “Door Into…” ebooks are among the oldest ones in the store, and we’ve started reformatting them to bring them into line with the newer ebooks (re: tables of contents, chapter breaks, other formatting issues). The Door Into Fire was just dealt with yesterday, and this morning our web lady told the software to alert those who’d purchased it that there was a new version available. The software sent out only two mails, which I don’t think can be right.
So for those of you who’ve bought a copy of Fire from the new ebook store at http://ebooksdirect.dianeduane.com, please use the download link from your post-purchase email to pull yourself down a new copy.
For those of you who bought your copies from the old bookstore (I’m not going to give the URL here as I don’t want the search engines picking it up any more): I’ve asked the Web Lady to add the new files to it as well so you also can use your download links to pull down new copies. It may take a day or so to handle this: We’re still working on this. I’ll let everybody know when the new downloads are ready. (On the other hand, maybe it makes more sense to wait until all three books have been reformatted before doing this. In any case, will advise. Watch this space.)
Just a note to let those interested know: the Japanese edition of A Wizard Abroad is now out.
Also available:
(The links go to the books’ pages at Amazon.co.jp.)
…Can one of the Japanese-speaking readership have a look at the individual pages, if they have a moment, and let me know whether there are ebook versions of these? If so, I’ll link back to them. (Leave a note in the comments below if you find anything useful.) Thanks!
There it is, the oldest and most beat-up copy I own of the book that got me spanked when I was eight.
Having until then been gorging on a SF/fantasy diet mostly split among Andre Norton, Alan Nourse, E. Nesbit and the Mushroom Planet books, suddenly I stumbled across this Heinlein person in the local library. And not through the juveniles, either: they came later. (And for me the dream screenwriting job would be adapting Have Spacesuit, Will Travel… especially now that George Lucas has kindly done all the heavy lifting as regards getting audiences used to star-spanning Empires.)
I read Starship Troopers in one crazed Saturday afternoon and came home with my head spinning from deep immersion in futuristic militaria: then unwisely started babbling to my father (whose birthday, interestingly, also was July 7th) that “all wars were caused by population pressure.” Heaven only knows what he made of such a sentiment coming out of my mouth at that point. What probably concerned him more, though, was that when he said “No they aren’t”, I said, “Yes they are, ” several times — because there was something about Heinlein’s discussion of the topic that seemed right to me at the time: right enough to risk contradicting my father.
It was the first argument about anything that I recall ever having had with anyone. Well, I guess the result was predictable: I got spanked for being disrespectful. The joke — or at least the first irony associated with this incident — is that my Dad went to his grave thinking he’d won that argument simply because I thereafter stopped discussing such things with him. But the circle closed when beyond all possible / reasonable expectation I met Heinlein himself, many years later, and over the course of the numerous conversations that followed I remembered the incident and told him about it. He snorted (don’t know how otherwise to describe the sound. He also did the best imitation of Bill the Cat having a hairball that anyone could imagine), and then burst out laughing. “Kind of a robust critique,” he said.
Dry understatement and humor, coupled with a fondness for amiable teasing and great courtesy of a slightly old-fashioned kind (he was the only human being ever to call me, repeatedly, “honey chile” and get away with it): that was what his conversational style was like whenever we spoke. Some time after The Door into Fire came out and he read it, he wrote me a fan letter (which I take out and look at occasionally when feeling down); and once we’d physically met — courtesy of a truly low-down and evil practical joke on the part of David Gerrold (which I’d frankly brought on myself by a joke I played on him) — Heinlein kindly gave me his home phone number and said to call when I needed writing advice.
This wasn’t a privilege I abused, and usually we wound up talking about anything but writing. This was when the Bill the Cat imitations were likely to occur. Or sometimes advice was needed: I consulted with him, for example, on the exact circumstances in which an officer outside the normal chain of command might be left in command of a Naval vessel, and the results of that discussion were used to stick poor Dr. McCoy into the Enterprise bridge’s center seat in Doctor’s Orders. (“You’ve built this whole damn book around that joke, haven’t you?” he said. Realizing I had no chance whatever of blathering this man into believing some other force than a play on words had been at work, I admitted that this was true. Another snort, more laughter. Heinlein respected Star Trek, and when we were discussing what I was working on, I got the sense that to him what we would now describe as a “tie-in” or licensed work was no less worthy than an original, as long as you did the work as well and honestly as you could. More than once over a number of phone calls he came back to that theme, so that it became a kind of mantra: “Joe’s beer money,” your readers’ disposable income that they hand over to you in exchange for entertainment, is sacred: to provide honest entertainment is no cause for shame — let the lit’rature fall where it may. )
I don’t know if anyone else around the Web does anything in particular about Heinlein’s birthday. God knows there are enough people to discuss his fiction, pro and con, sometimes (on either side) violently so. I’m not going anywhere in that direction except to say that all Heinlein’s work, the juvenile SF and adult SF alike, has been and continues to be a profound influence on me: and it was a pleasure to be able to tell him so. Dairine in the Young Wizards books, in particular, owes a lot to Poddy’s bratty little brother Clark in Podkayne of Mars (and Robert knew it, and was pleased: he liked Dairine. And Ed. “We Navy men don’t like sharks,” he said. “You made me like that shark. That was a dirty trick.” He said it with considerable relish, as if admiring the sleight-of-word that had sneakily corrupted his allegiances. Praise of that kind, from the acknowledged master to the journeyman, is the kind of thing you treasure.)
All a long time ago now, of course. I really miss not being able to call him any more. …But tonight at the local I’ll be raising a glass in his memory. And my Dad’s, of course. It’s kind of a pity they never met. They would have been very polite to each other… but the fireworks would have been fun to watch.
After a dry spell that lasted way too long for our farmer-neighbors’ preference, we’ve been having a lot of rain in the last couple of weeks, and as a result the grain in the fields has made up for lost time and is now coming along a lot better than it was doing in May and early June. The atmosphere of relief around here is palpable. Most of what’s grown in our immediate neighborhood barley rather than wheat, and destined for Guinness or anomal feed rather than anyone’s bread machine. But the locals still depend on the crops they grow to keep them (or their cattle) eatingafter the growing season is over.
The wildlife is also interested in eating that grain, of course, and as a result a sound specific to this time of year is now to be heard day and night: the bird-scarer. This is a simple device that creates a loud gas-powered BANG at intervals. (The better sort of these create the noise at random intervals rather than just doing it once every, say, four minutes and thirty seconds. But both kinds are in use within earshot of the house.)
You quickly learn not to notice this sound after a while (or else you go stark raving nuts…). But this morning I found myself noticing the noise, and realized that it was trying to remind me of something: specifically, the half-finished story of which a fragment follows — this passage being what was triggered by hearing a series of those BANGs late last summer. The story, “Borderlands”, takes place between the events of The Door into Sunset and The Door into Starlight; in it Herewiss is called in to solve a particularly nasty series of murders. Freelorn goes along with him, partly to get away from some of the more annoying aspects of being a king (like work…) and partly because, in general, there’s just no keeping him out of Herewiss’s business anyway. As the story develops, this turns out to have been an extremely good thing…
Really must finish this: it doesn’t have that much further to go. The story will turn up at the online store when it’s done (since there are already some other MK-based works on offer there), and maybe I’ll submit it someplace as well. Meanwhile, the fragment is under the cut.
Our friends and colleagues at Tandem Communications in Germany have just announced that they’re ready to go to principal photography on Ken Follett’s World Without End.
Tandem (predictably) did a spectacular job on Pillars of the Earth: their commitment to long-form event-TV storytelling (and their success at it) would certainly have been one of the factors assisting other newer long-form productions like Game of Thrones in getting off the ground.
Can’t wait to see how the sequel unfolds! In particular, John Pielmeier’s scripts are always a pleasure to read… looking forward to seeing how he handles the adaptation.
Now let’s all sit back and watch Rola invade Hungary again… 🙂
(Disclosure: yes, of course these are the people for whom I wrote The Lost Future. (The SyFy page is here.) On which I had a great time, and besides, who wouldn’t be proud to be associated with anything that gets Sean Bean running around the landscape in leather?…)