Future plans

(1) Eventually I'll be installing a kind of "grab bag" area here where scraps that get cut from books can be deposited. I don't see why the readership shouldn't see such things. It's not like any of you seriously believe that I emit these books whole, or that they leap out from my forehead fully armed with a shout when somebody hits me with an axe after I complain of a migraine. Any novel worth the name is a long, long game of Put 'N' Take -- in your head, if not in the computer or on the paper. Put something in, take it out: put it back in, take it out again. (Then go to copyedit, at which time the situation gets more fraught.) Some things that the author loves dearly wind up having nothing much to do with the story and get thrown out (on the "Kill your darlings" principle).

Often these scraps will contain character business that there just wasn't time for in a given book. For novels can't have as much casual chatter / inconsequentia in them as life; if they did, they'd be too much like... you know... life. Which is not what people come to novels for, as a rule. What you will get to see, as you look at these bits of omitted business, are the shadows of the lost, strayed or stolen interactions that I see when I look at a given book: the things that Kit would have said to Nita (and once did) when there was enough time: what Dairine said to Roshaun on the Moon: the writer's version of what Odin whispered in Baldur's ear before the pyre was lit...

(2) We'll be adding illustrations here, from time to time, as circumstances allow. They will not be cheap, since I am commissioning them from professionals (I was present at the very first meeting of ASFA, and feel a certain obligation toward its members and their spiritual "heirs and assigns".) For my own part, I may not be hurting, but I have cats to feed, so don't be surprised if getting the illustrations onsite takes a while. --DianeDuane 03:49, 24 Mar 2005 (EST)