Tad Williams

Things have been fairly quiet around here, not least because of the dreadful problems with our ISP (come on down, the phenomenally awful Sitestar!) ensuring that unless we actually pick up the phone (something we’re both loathe to do since it punctures the little creative bubbles we both wrap ourselves in as we wander the house and kick the dogs), we’re incommunicado and sans the raw material of business, apart from, of course, actual and toadally crucial writing. (That was a long sentence, huh.)

All of which is to say, I’m doing the rewrites on The Dragons of Ordinary Farm and Tad’s deep, deep into Shadowrise. He is in fact writing a minimum of 11 pages a day, which means he could be in the process of doing another Otherland 3: Mountain of Black Glass, i.e. completing the book in 6 months. I should also add that I read the first draft of that book whilst recovering from oral surgery, and it cheered me up no end. It’s perhaps my favorite of Tad’s novels, not the least because of the incredible retelling of The Illiad and the fall of Troy, backwards, which unlike, say, Amis’s Time’s Arrow, also has a point to it and actually takes you somewhere.

So there’s not much to report but that, and that we had some great meetings the last month or so – the very cool Teyo Johnson, an NFL footballer recently signed with the Buffalo Bills and possessed of both significant connections and smart, smart business plans; Dave Chariton, a Los Angeles talent manager and agent who impressed me greatly with his sunny drive and self-invention; and a long-standing basketball buddy of Tad’s (“I am really your husband’s psychiatrist, you know”) who is in his other life a high-level Silicon Valley muck-a-muck with whom I, blissfully, got to talk Art.

Jessa Crispin of Bookslut has written a wonderfully funny and clever article on the London Book Fair which brought a tear of nostalgia to my eye, and a phantom hangover just in memory of such events. Good God, that woman’s funny! The piece also, however, turns on this entirely serious theme:

It’s been a mystery throughout the fair why publishers are so frightened and bewildered by the Internet. I heard MP Tony Baldry connect the Internet with the collapse of the publishing industry. (It went something like, someone puts up recipes for free on a Web site, people just use the free recipes instead of buying the cookbook, publisher decides to stop publishing cookbooks, full collapse.)

Part of me wants to be impatient about that too. But depression is a national pastime in the UK (yes, it’s caused by something pretty obvious, i.e. the world’s worst climate), and another part of me is too aware of the fear I myself experience in the face of change (before, that is, I gird my loins and get to it.) Wandering, not-very-clever thought of the day – given that everyone’s scared about the rising consumption of short sound-bite-type pieces – might not the short story be the future of fiction? (Another Amis shout-out here, and this time of the positive variety: his incredible The Last Days of Mohammad Atta is perhaps the greatest piece of literary revenge I have ever read, and a true horror story with great moral point. I could find no authoritative spelling of Mohammad, by the way, without access to his 9/11 book’s contents page.)

Last but not least – GET WELL SOON DEAR MARK KREIGBAUM. He’s been pretty unwell, and we miss him.

OK, so like many of you reading this, we recently had a meeting with An Accountant Slash Financial Planner. It actually wasn’t a meeting that I can talk about without being impolitic, because whilst the financial side of things was good and what I was looking for – a conservative viewpoint on one aspect of our business – there was much else that was unsatisfying and a bit of a miss for us.

Over dinner that evening, the two Not-So-Small-Children asked us what went down. Tad responded by telling them the story of the industrious ant, the ne’er-do-well grasshopper, and what happens when winter comes along. I must admit I was onto my second happy glass of the evening. And therefore, smiling broadly, I told the kids there was another part to the tale, to wit: “The ant gets jiggy with it, and ever more full of his grand venture, namely, the storing up of everything for the bad times, ventures further and further afield until one day, joy of joys!, he stumbles upon a picnic, and there are good foodstuffs just lying all over the place. Nor does he stop to eat it, O no not he. But at just that moment bad luck really does strike, and he gets squished by a random flip-flop which, rising into the air, then shakes him off to expire in the grass, naught left of him but a leaky ant patty. And the unfeeling grasshopper comes by and yells at the ant as he draws his last breath – ‘See! See! I told you – life is short and you’d better live it to the max whilst you can!’ And then he goes away and helps himself to all the ant’s secret stores, being crafty enough, of course, to know exactly where they are. The End.”

Four Not-So-Small-Eyes grew very round. Daughter goes: “Is that really the rest of the story?” Daddy goes: “I think it just might be possible that Mommy’s making that up as she goes along.”

“Not necessarily,” saith I. And with a sniff, poureth another glass.

*

Oh! And this week we had a phone meeting involving Matt the Wonder-Agent, our new US publisher Brenda Bowen, the echoing input (but not presence) of LA agent Jody Hotchkiss (who’s handling film/tv rights), and our assistant, Dena Chavez, all of us discussing the editorial revisions for The Dragons of Ordinary Farm. (Jody’s already saying – This could be a real franchise, guys. Bless him – in fact, bless all three of them, for they get it!)

Now, this meeting was fab. We discussed all that was necessary to tie up the loose ends (the why of it all), revise characterizations (Tad and I originally had quite different takes on the patriarch of Ordinary Farm, Gideon Tinker, and this characterization worked least well as a result of things we hadn’t resolved about him), and re-pace things so it’s kind of – boom! – from the start.

So now myself and the beloved Man get to jabber intensely each morning, as each one of us gets up and throws around the ideas of the past 24. We are nearly finished with the Big Think stage of things. Plus, I am having a fine ole lesson in the use of Abstracts – namely, a document consisting of one-line summaries of each chapter – as a distancing device, so that we can slot material here and there, look at how it works in a new context, then revise it thematically, not chronologically. I can see it from above in this fashion, rather than being at basement level and going through the revisions one sequential chapter after another. I’m revising first , and then Tad will read and overwrite wherever he thinks necessary (it was the other way round for the last draft.) I’m learning loads (a prerequisite for any good day, goddammit!) and having a very jolly time.

And Tad’s deep, deep into Shadowrise. And the weather is bliss. So even if the Giants are crummy this season – what more right now could I ask for???

From: Hannes Riffel
Date: April 7, 2008 12:38:43 AM PDT
To: Deborah Beale
Subject: The Dragons of Ordinary Farm

Dear Deborah & Tad,

between editing 1000 page translations and doing my own (Stephen King at the moment), it took me longer than planned to read your first 'Dragon' novel. As an editor yourself, Deborah, you know how it is when you are getting your hands on a new book by an important writer -- the expectations are high and there's some trepidation involved.

Let me tell you that any expectations were met if not exceeded, and any trepidation turned out to be totally unwarranted! (Which, of course, you knew.) 'The Dragons of Ordinary Farm' is a wonderful novel and a great start to a new series. I especially liked the way you handle Lucinda and Tyler -- I don't have kids myself, but those I know well act and think just the way you describe them!

Something else I admire about the book is the fact that it has lots of dramatic scenes without taking away from the reality of the story. Which is an extraordinary feat indeed, considering this is a novel about a farm with dragons, unicorns and such. The reader is always inside the characters, and the potential of the plot is dangling in front of the reader like carrot on a stick.

I can't wait for volume two! (For which you have only yourself to blame.)

All the best to both of you and your kids

Hannes