This is a weird and complicated newsletter, because I’m going to try to explain what’s been going on with the current books. If you don’t want to read it all, “weird and complicated” is actually a good summation, and you can skip to the end.

By the way, I believe that The Last King of Osten Ard has now passed Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn for the longest time I’ve spent on one project. I’m not 100% positive, but I’ve always remembered writing that first multi-volume story as taking about seven years—starting Dragonbone Chair to finishing To Green Angel Tower. I believe I started TLKOOA in 2014, so we’ve slipped past that old record.

There were several reasons that MS&T took so long back in the day, the main ones being “massive life changes” and also “learning curve”, since it was my first multivolume story. The obstacles to finishing the current story have been both more complicated and more universal—the pandemic affected a lot more things in our world than just my publishing schedule. I also lost a great deal of fruitful work to shoulder troubles even before Covid, specifically chronic pain that made it really, really hard to think and required surgery, for which I had to wait several months. The operation fixed the main problem, thank goodness, but by the time I’d healed I’d lost most of a year of work. And then Covid scotched almost two years of publication time (the industry largely shut down) which has led me (and The Last King) down some odd and unexpected paths.

As you may have heard me say online, this last volume, The Navigator’s Children, has proved to be the strangest and most difficult book I’ve ever written. Because the pandemic largely shut down publishing for much of two years while I was working on the first iteration of Navigator(when it still represented the third and final volume of the TLKOOA trilogy) it was clear that I would have a long stretch of dead time before any books could be published. I had the short volume of Brothers of the Wind still to write, which I had previously planned to do after TLKOOA was completed, but the Covid-bomb blowing up publishing schedules made me decide to write it before completing Volume Last of TLKOOA, which was then still a trilogy.

This was actually a good thing, I have to admit. It allowed me to more fully integrate Brothers—which takes place a thousand years before Simon’s and Miriamele’s era—into the events of TLKOOA, an idea I had long preferred but had been forced to surrender because of my previous, pre-Covid writing/publishing schedule. (That being—I have to deliver books every so often or we don’t get paid money, and without money—well, you know how capitalism works, I don’t have to tell you.)

Somewhere during this time, I also realized that I had stumbled into another Four Book Trilogy, much to my chagrin. Go ahead and make fun of me: I deserve it. But I honestly thought I could do it this time. . . !

Anyway, at that point, I split the final volume into two parts, Into The Narrowdark (I’ll call it IND; it’s out now!) and The Navigator’s Children (called NVC from now on). I put aside the half of the story which would become NVC (and finalized IND while also writing Brothers of the Wind(BotW). This whole process took about a year, during which time I made many changes to various plots in IND while leaving NVC‘s first draft still unfinished, a sort of time-capsule of What I Had Planned, though many, many necessary changes/new ideas/improvements had come to me during the preparation of IND and BotW for publication, and they changed what NVC would be in many ways.

Some of this would have happened no matter what, especially if I had been writing the end of the story as a single, very long volume as I’d originally planned. The difference is that I wouldn’t have had to finalize any of the extremely complicated, intertwined plots and timelines until I had written the whole thing in first draft. But because of the changes, I had to solidify everything in IND and BotW—in other words, cast the details in cement by publishing them—and then integrate all those changes back into the unfinished half-a-book that was The Navigator’s Children, now Volume Four, as well as into the planned ending.

You’re probably familiar with how I work, at least in terms of the interlocking, intertwined focal-point plots spread over many characters that move forward roughly in the same timeframe. (In other words, if one plotline is taking place in a given week, the plotlines around it are fairly close to that in time, so that all the characters are moving forward roughly in synch.) So when I changed huge amounts of the story in IND and BotW because I’d come up with ideas I preferred, it left me with an absolute mess of conflicting, time-disconnected plotlines and wandering characters and general lack of continuity, including whole chapters of the NVC first draft that were no longer relevant and whole new ones that had to be written just to get back to where I was.

So that’s where I’ve been during the last half year since re-starting NVC: reconciling two years’ and two books’ worth of changed story with the half of the (complicated) book I’d already written, much of which was now wrong or different than it was when I set it down. It’s been a bit like playing 4-dimensional chess, because not only do I have to integrate the new plot elements with the previous version, but I have to try to recapture smooth flow of time that comes from writing a novel in roughly the order you finally read it—yes, I write a book more or less as it appears in the final version, pushing each plotline forward a little at a time as I’m creating the story.

It’s been . . . fun, in a strange, painful way, because it’s really hard work, and I love a challenge. But it’s also hard work and a challenge, so it’s slower than if I was just writing a final volume from scratch. And sometimes it makes my head really hurt. But, like I said, challenge.

Anyway, I just wanted to share some of my process stuff with you, my friends and readers, since Narrowdark has just hit the shelves. As I said, I’m moving forward finishing Navigator’s Children, and I think I’ve got the hardest of the problems dealt with. Now I can just concentrate on writing the ending to the whole TLKOOA story, finally, for the first time.

Thanks for your patience. I will do my absolute best to make sure the wait was worth it.

—Tad