This is an interesting number, for several reasons.
#Osten ard plus
I have to know how all the details actually work because these nexes or point-clouds I’m considering all affect each other and the whole rest of the story, plus the invented world history behind the whole thing.įor regular Tad readers, when I say that I have to work out the entire history of the Sithi and Norn people from back in the Garden up to the present moment of the new story - some fifteen thousand years’ worth, probably - and integrate it with not only what is going to happen in the new books ( The Witchwood Crown and The Heart of What Was Lost, which will come first) but of course everything that happened in a million words of MS&T, you may understand why although I’m lying on my back, I’m also clenching my teeth.ġ5,000 years of history, Tad wrote. I have about eight or nine plot/history/worldbuilding issues that I have to commit to before I finish the rewrites on the first new Osten Ard novels (one short and one long), but all eight or nine or eleven or whatever are such broad and complex and interrelated clouds of ideas that I have to focus at a much more granular level than I did earlier in the process, nailing things down in their final forms instead of “I’ll figure that out later”. Thank God Deb and the kids know that I’m actually doing something when I look like that, and I am not dead so nobody has to call the EMTs.
In 2016, in the throes of writing two novels at the same time, Tad wrote:īeen a really interesting last couple of days for me, work-wise, although nobody would have known it to look at me, since I spent most of it on my back, staring into space or with my eyes closed. The 721-page volume now sits proudly on my shelf, its onyx cover a stark contrast to the gleaming white covers of the earlier novels in the Osten Ard saga: The aforementioned The Dragonbone Chair, Stone of Farewell (1990), and of course To Green Angel Tower (1993), which holds the distinction of being one of the longest novels ever written. The Witchwood Crown is large, say those who have held it, though not quite as heavy as a small child. You won’t find any examples of Chuck Cunningham Syndrome in The Witchwood Crown, I promise. But my past irritations about the limitations of fiction helped me become a better continuity-checker, I think. “How hard would it have been to mention Chuck was away at school?” As I grew older, I realized that most television writers of that era didn’t care about continuity. “Why didn’t someone on the show say something?” I wondered.
The truth is, I had plenty of practice: for 40 years, I was an avid television-watcher, and I grew up in an era (the 1970s and 1980s) when American television writers weren’t always so careful about the continuity of their worlds.Ĭhuck Cunningham disappeared without Joanie or Richie ever noticing their brother was missing.Īs a television viewer, it always bothered me immensely, for example, when on The Cosby Show Cliff and Claire Huxtable claimed they had five children when previously they had stated they only had four, and when oldest child Chuck Cunningham suddenly disappeared from Happy Days without his family, or anyone else, ever noticing he was gone.
I was quite honored to serve as a beta reader I also feel I did a good job pointing out continuity errors in the manuscripts. I also served on the team that reviewed the shorter Osten Ard novel The Heart of What Was Lost in 2016. And near the end of the process, I also worked on the Appendix in the back of the book. A pictorial map I drew back in 1992 served as the basis for the beautiful new maps created by mapmaker Isaac Stewart. I also later helped as a consultant for the new Witchwood Crown maps. I received these early versions of the book because it was my rare privilege to be asked by Tad to be part of the team reviewing The Witchwood Crown manuscript for mistakes, a process I very much enjoyed because I absolutely loved the previous novels ever since I first read the first Osten Ard novel, The Dragonbone Chair, in November 1988.
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