So what am I working on these days, and why?

Return with me now on the wings of memory to those dim, forgotten days of the 1990s, when I had but recently left my original home in the ferocious world of publishing, Del Rey Books, to take refuge at Tor. (The previous post explains much of why I made that move.)

When I first arrived at Tor it was with a Big Fat Fantasy novel called Touched By the Gods, which I had planned out originally with the idea of selling it to Del Rey, and which Del Rey had summarily rejected, not because there was anything wrong with the idea, but because I wanted a larger advance than they were willing to pay. To the best of my knowledge the people who decided against buying it hadn’t even read the proposal; they were focused entirely on the money.

The fine folks at Tor had no such qualms — at least, not immediately, though they have, since then, whittled down my advances, little by little. Which is annoying but not unforgivable, since in fact I’ve never yet earned out an advance the size of the one I got for Touched By the Gods. They bought the book, and published it, and that was good, but it left me (and them) with the obvious question, “Okay, now what?”

My intention at Del Rey had been to write another Ethshar novel next, and while bringing the series to Tor was definitely in my plans, and obviously we later managed it briefly, it was too soon. I needed another novel to establish myself first.

I had this idea I’d been mulling over, compiled from several sources, that I thought would do, so I wrote that. The title was Dragon Weather.

That worked just fine. I thought it was a very successful novel, both artistically and financially. It was not, however, especially original as far as the plot went — as many people (including me) pointed out, I’d swiped a lot of the story from Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.

I was hardly the first to swipe from Dumas. Alfred Bester had swiped a lot of the exact same stuff I did for The Stars My Destination, and Steven Brust lifted much of the plot of The Three Musketeers and its sequels for his series that began with The Phoenix Guards. Hey, why not? These are great stories, long since out of copyright and become part of the general culture; some stories (King Arthur, Robin Hood, etc.) get recycled over and over and over.

Anyway, I wrote Dragon Weather and its two sequels, alternating with two Ethshar novels, and when those were done I wrote the Annals of the Chosen, which was a sort of deconstruction of the whole “plucky band of heroes defeats the Dark Lord” idea.

Usually I like to have at least two projects going at once, to keep myself fresh; that was why I alternated SF and fantasy back in the 1980s, and why I alternated Ethshar and the Obsidian Chronicles at Tor. The Annals of the Chosen didn’t alternate with anything, though, because Tor balked — they prefer, for sound marketing reasons, to have each series appear without interruption. I came up with side-projects, such as online serials and The Turtle Moves!, to break up the workload on the Annals of the Chosen, but it was a slog.

For one thing, I’d discovered that the Annals weren’t fun to write. The setting turned out to not be a congenial one for me to work in. I don’t really know why; it just wasn’t. When I’d thought it up it sounded like fun, but it wasn’t. That meant the whole series took much longer to write than it should have, because I faced each day’s work with dread rather than anticipation, and was all too eager to knock off rather than writing just one more page.

So when I finished The Summer Palace, and once again was faced with the “What next?” question, I was determined to write something that was fun to write. Ethshar is fun, but Tor wouldn’t take any more Ethshar stories. So, I asked myself, what else had been fun to write?

Dragon Weather. Dragon Weather had been a joy to write. I loved working on it.

I wasn’t about to go back and extend the series, though; as far as I was concerned, that story was finished. Yeah, I’ve had readers ask for a sequel, but I believe in the adage “Always leave ’em wanting more.” I’d plotted a prequel, Lord Dragon, about how Enziet became what we see in Dragon Weather, but prequels are very tricky, as you need to be extremely careful not to contradict anything in the already-written stories, and it would be a pretty downbeat story, so I didn’t think it was the fun I was looking for. No, I wanted something new.

So what had made Dragon Weather fun?

Well, the slightly old-fashioned style was a kick to write. Having stolen a tried-and-true plot had eliminated a lot of my usual worries, even if I did eventually diverge drastically from Dumas’ original storyline. It was a swashbuckler, and I like swashbucklers.

So maybe I should write another swashbuckler. Maybe I could even swipe a plot from some other classic swashbuckler.

I was mulling that over, but hadn’t really settled on anything, when someone gave me a DVD of the Leslie Howard/Merle Oberon version of The Scarlet Pimpernel.

There was a plot worth swiping!

But the thing is, there’s so much implied background to the story. You need to know the basics of the French Revolution to understand what’s going on, because the narrative never bothers to explain them.

And speaking of the French Revolution, that was background for The Count of Monte Cristo, too, though much less so. And it’s also the background for Sabatini’s Scaramouche, and for the Horatio Hornblower stories (another oft-imitated series I was tempted to swipe). In fact, most of the classic swashbucklers, unsurprisingly, draw on major events in European history.

I don’t want to write historicals. Too much research. Besides, I’m a fantasy writer; I want to use wizards and dragons and magic. But maybe, I thought, I could come up with a setting where I could fit all these classic plots and make them my own. I could put them all into a single series, that could run forever without running out of material. In fact, I could take some of the other plots and projects I had lying around unfinished, and tie them in, too.

What were key events in European history that I wanted to use, and what could I dump? Well, you need the fall of Rome, and the French Revolution, and the expansion of the British Empire, and the Age of Exploration, but you don’t need all that medieval stuff — that’s already been done to death in fantasy. You don’t need Scandinavia at all, or Greece, or Christianity. Oh, sure, they’re hugely important in European history, but I don’t need them for the stories I want to tell.

And I came up with the Good Parts Version of Europe and European history, which, when I was done, really didn’t look much like Europe at all. My Old Empire had its capital in Paris (now called Lume), not in Rome, and was ruled by wizards; it fell in six months, rather than over a period of centuries. The Iberian peninsula is gone entirely; if I need Spain or Portugal later I’ll improvise something. The English Channel became a stony desert inhabited by dragons. The moon is gone. No religious wars as such; the near-universal religion involves a god and goddess and ancestor worship, though there are lots of odd cults kicking around.

The French Revolution is now the Fall of the Sorcerers, when the magicians who rule the Walasian Empire are overthrown.

And I have dozens of stories I want to tell set in the Bound Lands, as my Western Europe analogue is called. I’m not going to follow chronological order for the entire thing, but I’m starting with the Fall of the Sorcerers, and I do want to keep that in chronological order, which means I can’t start with The Scarlet Pimpernel, since that begins with the Terror in full swing. Before I get to that I need to cover the Fall of the Bastille (now the destruction of the Pensioners’ Quarter), and a lot of other stuff. In fact, even the destruction of the Pensioners’ Quarter wound up in the second volume, Above His Proper Station.

Where did I start? Well, A Young Man Without Magic is dedicated to Rafael Sabatini; that’s a clue.

I’m not slavishly following any of the plots I’m swiping; they all twist and mutate as I play with them, and Walasia is very definitely not France. (And if you’ve read Scaramouche, you know there’s a really central plot point that, if I used it, would have people saying I was swiping Star Wars. So I dropped that entirely, and that changes the whole story.)

The feel of the series, though, is still modeled on swashbucklers — Dumas, Sabatini, Orczy, and a thousand obscure pulp authors.

So that’s what I’m doing. I hope readers will have as much fun reading these as I’m having writing them.

I’ve just delivered A Young Man Without Magic to my agent, so before I get busy with something else let me write my promised account of how the “Worlds of Shadow” series came about.

When I started writing for publication my ambitions were relatively modest; I just wanted to tell entertaining stories and make money doing so. While the cliché at the time was that every fantasy writer was imitating Tolkien, my primary models in fantasy were Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber Jr., Michael Moorcock, and L. Sprague de Camp. I wasn’t trying to write epics; I thought of myself as writing sword & sorcery.

I made the mistake of saying that once in front of Lester del Rey, who informed me in no uncertain terms that my work was not sword & sorcery, because Del Rey Books did not publish sword & sorcery.

Could’ve fooled me.

Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey had very definite ideas of what Del Rey wanted from their authors. Sometimes this caused a lot of friction with their authors; Tim Powers left Del Rey and went to Ace because what he wanted to write wasn’t what Lester wanted him to write, Phyllis Eisenstein went into a multi-year stretch of writer’s block after Lester got nasty about her plans for a sequel to Sorcerer’s Son, and Lester and Stephen Donaldson were constantly feuding, to the point Judy-Lynn hired an assistant editor whose primary function at Del Rey was to keep between them and prevent Lester from driving cash-cow Donaldson to another publisher.

Back then I generally got along with them just fine, though; the stuff I wanted to write was more or less what they wanted to publish.

However, Judy-Lynn started telling me somewhere around 1982 that I really ought to write a Big Fat Fantasy (her term, and the first place I heard it), something that had bestseller potential. So I started thinking about that, off and on.

Those were busy years, though; I was writing more than a novel a year, our daughter was born in 1983, we’d bought a small farm I was running and an unfinished house I finished, and I didn’t have a whole lot of time to devote to a big project. I got as far as plotting a novel called The Gates of Faerie, which I still haven’t written and probably never will; I had a proposal almost ready to submit in the autumn of 1985 when Judy-Lynn had a stroke and went into a coma. She died early in 1986.

That took the wind out of my sails on The Gates of Faerie. It had been targeted at Judy-Lynn, and she was gone. I never finished writing up the sample chapter for the proposal. Bits from the story have turned up in various works since, but the original project died with Judy-Lynn.

The idea of writing a Big Fat Fantasy, though, lingered. It would have to be aimed at Lester, and his tastes were a little different.

And then one day I was reading Locus, being annoyed that they never seemed to review my work, and I read a review of a Barbara Hambly novel (I forget which) that called it “another war against the dark,” and then went on to be a very favorable review indeed.

“They want a war against the dark, I’ll give them a war against the dark,” I said. “That can be my Big Fat fantasy.”

In fact, I told myself, if they want clichés, I’ll give them clichés. I’ll put every over-worked trope I can think of into a single story, but I’ll make them all new by treating them realistically, instead of the ways they’ve usually been treated.

I started collecting clichés — exiled princes, space pirates, elves, zombies, galactic empires, slave auctions, dark lords — and assembling them into a single story, which I called (of course) The War Against the Dark.

It was pretty dark and nasty. In the real world pirates are vicious thugs, people who try to overthrow tyrants mostly die without accomplishing anything, slavery is brutal and unromantic, and that’s how I was going to treat all this stuff. There would be humor, but it would be black humor. The idea was to present all these old clichés and show just how absurd they were.

Meanwhile, things at Del Rey were getting weird. With Judy-Lynn gone there was no one who could get Lester to meet deadlines, delegate duties, or prioritize his workload. Getting a proposal accepted could take as much as two years, as I discovered with The Spell of the Black Dagger. I wrote every word of Taking Flight while waiting for Lester to get around to reading a twenty-page (double-spaced) proposal for The Spell of the Black Dagger.

Lester was absolute ruler of fantasy at Del Rey; Judy-Lynn had run the SF program and everything else other than fantasy. The War Against the Dark had originally been planned as a fantasy, with the SF elements downplayed, but after the absurd delay on Dagger my agent and I decided to shift the emphasis, play up the cross-genre nature, and sell it to Owen Lock, who had Judy-Lynn’s old job as publisher and SF editor, because Owen could be expected to reply in a couple of months, instead of years.

Sure enough, Owen looked over the proposal promptly, and he and my agent started negotiating — and things got weird again. We’d set a minimum advance we wanted, and Owen had said he wouldn’t pay it, so it looked as if we were going to pick up our marbles, leave Del Rey, and talk to Bantam. (Given what happened to Bantam’s SF/fantasy line a couple of years later, I’m really glad that didn’t happen.) Owen didn’t want that, and broke the impasse in a creative (and in retrospect, downright stupid) way.

He offered three times what we’d asked if I would turn the project from one Big Fat Book into a trilogy.

That is, he wouldn’t pay X for one novel, but he would pay 3X for three. This would mean my very first (and so far, last) six-figure advance, and in theory it would mean Del Rey would have to put some push behind the book. It might well be the break-out project Judy-Lynn had talked about back in 1982.

When my agent told me that on the phone I was kind of stunned. That much money? But turn it into a trilogy? How? It was supposed to be one Big Fat Book.

So I started thinking about it, and concluded it could be done, so I agreed, and we signed the contracts.

What I did was to split the original story in half, as Out of This World and In the Empire of Shadow. I’d intended to have an epilogue, maybe 3,000-5,000 words, that would wrap up loose ends, and that wound up as the basis for The Reign of the Brown Magician, though obviously I added a lot more plot and stuff. I started writing.

I’m really not sure just how carefully Owen Lock had read the proposal; it was only well after the deal was made that he seemed to realize the story could be treated as fantasy, rather than SF. (Pretty dark fantasy, at that.)

While I was writing, Del Rey was changing. Lester was eased out, and then died. Owen Lock moved up the corporate ladder out of editorial. There was a shake-up of the editorial department, and my favorite editor in the entire world, who I’d been working with for years, Deborah Hogan, left the company. (Lester had been the acquiring editor, but Deborah was my line editor, doing the detail work, since about 1985.) Deborah was there long enough to accept Out of This World, but she was gone well before the second book was finished; in fact, there was no longer anyone at Del Rey who had read the original proposal and understood just how dark the series was meant to be.

So the first book was packaged as something relatively light, with a bright cover and a quote on the back about whether a flying car looks more like a Buick or an Oldsmobile. Horribly misleading. I think that the people responsible thought the other two volumes would cheer things up and lead to a traditional happy ending.

And while it was published as a hardcover, it was not the lead hardcover — Owen Lock, a huge fan of alternate history, had instead decided to put the entire promotional budget for the month behind the first volume of Harry Turtledove’s WorldWar series.

Sales, to be blunt, sucked. And I got hate mail from readers who had expected a light fluffy read and instead got grief and pain and despair.

So the second volume was published in trade paperback, instead of hardcover, and sold even worse, because who’s going to buy the middle book of a trilogy in a format the first volume was never in?

The third volume was then delayed so long that the contracts had to be amended, and eventually appeared only in mass-market paperback.

By that time I had left Del Rey and gone to Tor. Judy-Lynn and Lester and Deborah were all gone; there was no one at Del Rey I cared about, and no one at Del Rey who cared about me. I think the guy who “edited” In the Empire of Shadow was already gone, as well — in fact, I don’t even remember who edited The Reign of the Brown Magician. Probably the same guy, but I’m not sure. He was a nice guy, but in my opinion a lousy editor, which is why I’m not naming him.

And my sales hadn’t been good enough to keep Del Rey collectively interested in keeping me around — not at the price they’d paid per volume for the “Three Worlds” trilogy (as it was then known), anyway. When we asked the same price for Touched by the Gods, they didn’t negotiate, they just said no.

So I left, and got that advance from Tor, instead.

I’m much happier at Tor than I ever was at Del Rey after Judy-Lynn’s death.

Anyway, I think “Worlds of Shadow” is a good story, and I’m very proud of it, but when Wildside reprinted it, I made sure they packaged it dark, almost like horror, because that’s what it is. Del Rey mishandled it horribly, in my opinion. They never really looked at it to see what it was they’d bought.

If it had been marketed differently, I still think it might’ve been a hit.