Squealing
This came in my email today and I love it so much I have to show it to you:
I just want to say that I love your books* and look forward to reading your new ones in the future**. I have just finished reading Chalice and was wondering if you might be planning or writing a squeal in the near future? Hope all is going well with Pegasus and you finally get some sleep. Have a Happy Holidays*** and a bright New Year!†
It is particularly apropos as I lurch and stagger toward that Las-Vegas-in-the-desert of finishing a novel. No pile of chips on your side of the table could look better than a pile of finished manuscript.†† I don’t write sequels.††† But I definitely perform squealing. A lot. Especially at the ends of writing novels.
And I should be wrapping birthday presents‡. It’s past midnight. It’s Peter’s birthday. And . . . well, the guest post will probably get put off till Thursday. Tomorrow we are due, if all goes as planned ‡‡, to have an Interesting Adventure. ‡‡‡
* * *
* Thank you!
** Thank you more!
*** This begins with getting PEGASUS turned in next Tuesday.
† And this depends on getting on like a speeding hellhound with PEG II.
†† Although the pile of chips might cash out better. I’m sure successful professional gamblers buy dog food and rose bushes and attic floors without pause for thought, let alone the longer pause for the thoughtful exercise of basic arithmetic.
††† I am however already sweating the not-writing-a-sequel thing as applied to the new situation that is PEGASUS. I used merely to bellow I don’t write sequels! ^ which covered the situation well enough. HERO is not merely a prequel, but barring some mythology, one mage and a vision or two, it has a completely separate cast of characters from SWORD. I got really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really TIRED of requests/demands for the next Damar book/the third of the trilogy, this last not assisted by some idiot marketing person advertising Damar as a trilogy. That third volume lived on as a (very annoying) ghost in Books in Print for years. One of the things I don’t know is if I’m not a sequel writer anyway (which I think is probably the truth) or if any possibility of my becoming a sequel writer was thumped out of me as a result of the modest success of SWORD and HERO: I’ve told you about that. ‘What are you going to do with the rest of your life?’ is not a good question for a deeply insecure, I-didn’t-really-write-them-and-I-know-I-can’t-do-it-again 32-year-old author who has just won the Newbery Medal with her third novel^^ to hear. To keep writing at all I at least had to get the hell out of Damar.
And then later of course there was SUNSHINE. And now there is PEGASUS. And there are the several Third Damar Novels, and the fact that I don’t write sequels has become contentious. I can’t call PEG II not-a-sequel, although that’s what it is, because I’m already calling the not-a-sequel to SUNSHINE not a sequel, which it also is, but for entirely different reasons: ALBION, SUNSHINE’s not-a-sequel, is not a sequel like HERO isn’t a sequel to SWORD: whole different cast of characters. Unlike SWORD and HERO, ALBION takes place within a few years of SUNSHINE (I’m not sure about this myself: I’ll find out when I start writing it down), but while ALBION’s heroine lives downstate from New Arcadia (to begin with), I don’t think she knows anything about Sunshine or Charlie’s Coffeehouse. (I could be wrong. I so often am.) The Several Third Damar Novels are also not sequels in this category of not-sequels.
But then I have to go and write frelling PEGASUS. PEG II is not a sequel because (as I keep, er, squealing) it’s the second half of the same story. If I had the intestinal fortitude I might’ve just written one 300,000-word novel. AAAAAAUGH. No. But this does confuse the sequel issue. Wasn’t my life confusing enough already? she squealed.
^ I’m trying to think if I’ve ever written a novel I’ve never had a hopeful query about a sequel to. Hmm. No. I’ve even had them for BEAUTY, which, as endings go, I would have said was fairly comprehensive.+ And for quite a few of the short stories. Rather a lot of people are extremely cross about the brevity of the summing-up at the end of Pool in the Desert++ . . . so what about the great duel between Hetthar and the sand-god Geljdreth? Indeed. And I’ve already had half a dozen requests for a sequel to First Flight, and FIRE is barely fricking out yet, and one or two for Hellhound. I don’t write sequels. I’d be happy to do any of these+++ if it were up to me, which it’s not, as I also keep saying. Squealing.
Knowing myself a little better now than I did thirty years ago I’d say that there’s a not-too-bad chance of my finding myself writing something in the world of either CHALICE or Water Horse because the set-ups tug at me, and SPINDLE’S END because the sheer looniness of that world . . . ahem . . . appeals to me.++++ But actual sequels? Curiously . . . but ask me next year+++++ . . . these seem likeliest for Hellhound or First Flight. I think this may be because they’re recent, and short. Short stories never set as solidly as novels do; there’s always a little give left in them; and my nerve-endings now still remember writing those two. But the fact is still that I write what comes to me, and I haven’t written any short-story sequels yet either. Maybe short stories just like to tease.
+ Aside from small matters like not telling you what name Beauty gives the ex-Beast. Mwa ha ha ha ha. This is the same author who a quarter century later would end a book with the line ‘I went with him into the night.’ I am just like this.~
~ Do you want me to tell you again that this is the way the story goes? Mind you, I strongly approve of not ruining a nice bit of open-endedness like either of these examples, and I might have done it anyway, but both of these are the story’s idea.
++ Speaking of deserts
+++ The only sequel I can think of that I’m rather relieved to be let off is the sequel to OUTLAWS. As usual, I know quite a lot about what happens after the novel I wrote ends, but they all go to the Holy Lands with their unpleasant king, and I know the life expectancy there is really bad. I’ve stopped myself finding out just how severe the attrition rate is, although I do know a few do make it back to England again.
++++ I should really be saying country rather than world. Barring SUNSHINE and DRAGONHAVEN most of my books take place in the same world. DEERSKIN and SPINDLE overtly share geography with Damar, for example . . . as does PEGASUS.
+++++ Like, after I get PEG II in.
^^ Glory, glory hallelujah that BEAUTY did not win, as I’ve had a number of people tell me it should have.
‡ The ends of. I also need to go to bed.
‡‡ When does anything ever go as planned?
‡‡‡ Although it may be more/less interesting than planned, if the sleet settles in. We never did have sleet last night—in fact after all the jungle-hoicking, it didn’t even get down to freezing, and a good thing too, since in my state of champagne-further-befuddled unawakeness I managed to leave several tender and beloved little green things outdoors. They were mad at me this morning but no worse. But tonight . . . tonight’s the real deal. And I’m too old to find adventures which involve driving on ice appealing.
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