Njolma wrote:First of all i want to say that your books are the reason i read scifi. Working as a security guard over nights i found the in fury born hardback and being bored i read it. Since then scifi has been my genre and safehold is by FAR my favorite series you are working on still. That said i feel somewhat cheated by fiery trials. I understand this book is house cleaning and laying the ground for the next story arc and im fine with that but we didn't even get a description of merlins wedding we got blindsided by him(her?) Adopting two kids. You killed the archbishop of glacerheart off screen as well as several other characters without so much as a howdy do. I love your work and i will preorder the next book from 90% of your series still but please remember that these characters have meaning to us and if their story must end or change we want to be part of those events. Even just a flashback with a brief description is enough i dont need 70 pages of a wedding i just want to have enough i can feel i was part of it. Your work inspires me and brings joy to my life keep up the amazingness that is your stories. Thank you for your time.
An adoring fan
First, let me thank you for the very kind words. I can't tell you how good it makes a writer feel when someone tells him that his characters are important to them.
Once upon a time, I had Merlin and Nynian's entire wedding in the manuscript. It might still turn up somewhere in a piece of short fiction. However, I was looking at the number and the intensity of weddings, deaths, and other relationships in this book, and I decided — rightly or wrongly — that I would deliberately make a handful of the most important ones happen offstage. I did that for a couple of reasons. One (and not the most important) was to control word count. A more important one was to pick and choose so as to avoid (or at least limit) the "overload quotient" on those affairs. Another was to make you, the reader, feel the transitory nature of life on behalf of my characters. Archbishop Zhasyn, for example. You knew that character, you loved that character, and having him die — or, having you learn that he's
already died, and how — has a totally different sort of impact when it's one of the in-universe characters reflecting on it, recognizing the cost, than when I put it front and center. (If you've read the Honor Harrington books, that's one of the reasons that Alistair McKeon dies "off stage" --- so that the reader gets to see the shock effect through Honor's eyes without any "pump priming" on my part first.) As far as Nynian and Merlin's wedding is concerned, I sort of had to pick and choose between Nimue's struggle with her emotions where Koryn was concerned or Merlin's
acceptance of
his (and his total acceptance of his male personality) on stage. I've spent so much more time with Merlin and Nynian that I felt it was appropriate to give Nimue the stage for that aspect of Nimue
Alban's journey but that I'd be venturing into overkill territory. Moreover, I think the "what did you say?" effect for the reader is greater in seeing Merlin and Nynian in a settled relationship that happened offstage. Besides, having them already settled into their marriage before Nynian is counseling Nimue was an important part of the emotional evolution for me.
The bottom line is that even being far more ruthless than I usually am in cutting back on the interpersonal scenes, this was a big book. It had to cover a lot of ground chronologically, it had to set the foundation for what follows, and it was always going to be primarily a lot more about characters and the spread of industrialization (and its societal impacts) than about military conflict. I had to balance the relative importance of scenes I knew a lot of readers would want to see, and I'm sure I didn't hit exactly the right balance for
anyone. If you'd wanted another 100,000 words or so, I probably could have, though!
