That was the longest RAFO I’ve ever been given. OK, so last question. So you know the ending now, straight from the bard’s mouth.
I do.
Do you recognize it from those first musings twenty-plus years ago?
As with a lot of things in the books, it had morphed some. So, a couple weeks before he died, he explained it to me in excruciating detail ‘cause the two of us can talk for a while. There was extreme detail on the last scene: who was standing and who was not. What was going on. Who was casting glances at who. And where there was laughter. You are . . . OK, there’s enough hints. And who was casting a suspicious eye at someone when they were riding away. But other than that . . . hehe, yeah. But it had morphed and changed somewhat. He knew the ending, but there was some beautiful additions, it had . . . I don’t know.
Matured?
Yeah, matured. That is a very good term for it. It was not simplistic. And the reason Harriet said to do this is, well, did you sit in on the session yesterday with Larry? [about the expanded universe]
No, I’m afraid I missed it.
Alright, well, there was discussion of the outrigger novels by Jason Denzel and he handled that very beautifully. I wasn’t on the panel, but I added this, and I’ll give it to you too. The big reason that there are these three books, the three books to finish the main sequence, is that a couple weeks before Jim died he asked me who he thought could finish the books.
Now, all along, while he was talking about this piece of work, as we were fishing, one of the things he would say, and other people in the family had heard it too, was, “If I die, and somebody tries to finish this, you will kill them. And if you don’t, I will come back and haunt you and them. Because this is my work, and nobody is going to finish it but me. And if I go too soon, that’s it.” And we’d do that in laughter, but he was serious. This is his work.
So when he asks me, two weeks before he died, “Who do you think could finish it?,” it set me back on my heels. Now, with that he told us that he wanted the work finished, really wanted it finished. So even though Harriet was devastated by the loss, we all were, we felt obliged to finish this work for him. That doesn’t mean there will be outriggers or what-have-you. There may be. But the big thing here is now about Harriet, and if at the end of this, if she is still having fun, who knows where it goes.
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