This is the eleventh in sequence, or twelfth book. Where are we going to? Do you have a definite end point in mind?
Oh yes. I’ve known the last scene of the last book for…oh, over twenty years. I could have written it back then, and if I had done so and put it away, and then rewrote it now, the wording might change but what happens would not. There will be one more novel.
One more.
One more—the twelfth book. That will be so even if that book has to be 2000 pages in hardcover, and require a luggage cart and shoulder strap to get it out of the store.
I’m getting the feeling that you’re ready to be done with this.
Well, it’s not so much that I’m ready to be done with it, as—I think I can do it in a shorter book than that—but, you know, I set out in this thing thinking it’s a 10K run, maybe a 15K, and suddenly I found out I was in a marathon. Now, if you’re running a marathon, running a good 20-mile time or a good 22-mile time is all very well, but it doesn’t count until you cross the finish line.
That’s exactly right. People want to know where you’re going with that. And you know, you say you wrote a marathon, but actually I think you’ve defined the marathon. There’s a lot of people trying to keep up writing series that go this long and have this kind of following.
Well, you know, the series going this long is a matter of me undertaking to tell more story than I thought I was setting out to tell. In the beginning, I really thought I could do it in five or six books. By the time I finished The Great Hunt I knew five or six books….it wasn’t going to happen, but I didn’t know how many, and for a number of books, I was frankly pulling numbers out of the air. People would ask me how many it would be, and I’d say six or seven, maybe eight, eight or nine. [laughter] Now I think I can finish it in a twelfth book, and I certainly intend to do so if I can. I believe I can.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.