What do we want to see in the next book?

SNIP (Emphasis mine)

NervousEnergy wrote:The total radio silence from the MWW does tend to indicate he's hard at work at it.

I wouldn't say that... By his own admission, RFC isn't on the forums all that much because he IS busy, and when not writing he's trying to enjoy some (well deserved) family time.

NervousEnergy wrote:When he's really engaged and feeling good he can put words down like only a couple of other people in the business. I'm with you, though, that end of November probably isn't likely.

IIRC, David told us he has historically written close to a million words per year (but is trying to cut that down to about 600K). In his Announcement with his notes about the schedule, he told us that one of his HH series releases would be about 185K words. Granted, the Safehold series has just a slightly higher average word count than that, but still that's 3-4 books per year if it's a million words (certainly 2-3 at 600K). Based on that, and barring any unforeseen issues, I think his November guestimate wouldn't be that far off. Certainly by the end of the year.

NervousEnergy wrote:Plus I don't think we have any data at all about where or even if Tor has scheduled it.

Again, from David's schedule announcement of 3 June, he thought that the book would be released later in 2018. Given all the editing and post-production work that has to occur, and based on his previous comments about the accelerated release schedule of either HFQ or ATSoT (I can't remember which it was), I woudl think that this is about right. Of course the second half of 2018 is still a 6-month period, and a lot can happen in 6 months!

PlaysWithBees wrote:In OAR, Pei Kau-yung stated “Besides myself, only one other person knows of your existence, and he and I have an appointment with Administrator Langhorne ...” We still don’t know who that other person was or if he actually made it to the appointment or was possibly instrumental in the resistance that lead to the War of the Fallen... or even set up his own additional “string”.

About the only possibility would be Proctor, as Shan-wei was already dead by that point. Somebody had to override the ten day limit, and Proctor was the only one who could have done that; at least of the people that have been introduced so far.

Remember that all the official records showed that the PICA had been transferred to the escort fleet which was destroyed a decade before Safehold was found. The discussion of the use of a PICA was certainly kept to only those that attended the dinner the night before departure, and of those, only Proctor and Nimue are explicitly named. Kau-yung Pei and Shan-wei were certainly there, and probably hosted the dinner. Of course, there could have been other senior staff there. Do we know where Proctor was when Alexandria was destroyed?