About the Series

Teot's War

Naga Teot popped into my head as one of those images (big surprise!) who simply had to be written down. Then other bits of that story followed. While I was living in a cramped college apartment with my middle sister, I began to recognize that some of these separate bits and pieces belonged together, or overlapped. I saw plot hanging out that could be tied together in a coherent narrative.

There were other bits from other stories scattered in there too, and I've found other bits still pop up from time to time. Now, I write those other bits up, stuff them in the appropriate computer folder, and let them compost; every once in awhile I visit those other stories and fork them over and try to figure out if they're ready for submission. I always feel guilt about spending time on other stories, but I do wander off onto them, sometimes for weeks at a time. (The musical, written with Tim Randles based on the first Teot book, was a huge months-long distraction of exactly this sort, but I learned a lot from doing it. Mainly, it taught me to hand off notes to a real movie scriptwriter, and walk away slowly, without running.) Often they are a way of ducking a decision or a problem on the main Teot rewrites, but I do value them because they're fresh work in a different tone, and sometimes they work out a problem and teach me a way around some logjam on the main novel. Yes, I have a very sneaky subconscious.

But let's get back to that apartment kitchen table crowded with stacks of paper on it. Once I realized which bits belonged together, I got excited about making it into a cohesive story, and finding out what happened next. So I didn't start off writing a series called Teot's War. I originally wrote a stack of mega-novel manuscript about four inches thick, and got in some fact-checking. This was when I made the amazed discovery that my subconscious knew what it was doing, that quite different descriptions of things that had nothing to do with each other still hung together in a consistent way. That is spooky. I expect mistakes, you know, I expect to find inconsistencies, to find that the industrial facts don't support this or that ignorant plotline. What's spooky is when you *were* right. For instance, a friend loaned her very old unabridged dictionary from 1912, which is to blame for using details of the cyanide process of electroplating silver. It's exactly the sort of detail I simply can't resist.

It also leads to very large piles of messy interlined corrections, I'm afraid. In the era before PCs, this came in in a mixture of typescript and corrections and hand-written scraps which, after that divorce I mentioned, my mother did the typing and excellent proof-reading to beat it into a submission copy. Yes, really, my mother did that for me! The carbons fit into two notebook binders. I submitted it to an agent known to a friend of a friend, who liked it, and then had a fairly typical struggle to sell something that big and awkward and written in the wrong person. Some rejection letters explained that nobody in that era was doing first person. I gathered the impression that third person in small books for beginning novelists in SF & F was the general rule. I had no idea where to find out what the rules were (now there's all kinds of info out there on the web, and people to ask, too). I had virtually no money to buy SF & F magazines that might have clued me in, since I was spending all that on what few books I could afford, silly me.

A doorstop-sized stack like that might perhaps get published now, but it was impossible for a first novel then. I rewrote, but that only made it worse! It grew, it budded outward, foaming like yeast! The world I was building kept wanting to get bigger, and the story living in it kept looping and multiplying every time I left it in a box somewhere.

I'll talk a bit more about the background, even thought it's a secondary focus when I'm writing. The interaction of the two main characters are what drove this sequence of stories for me. I do think about the background, the politics, out of a concern to get the details right, because that makes the story feel more solid and convincing.

If I could have summarized the characters in a line or two, of course I wouldn't have needed to write all that manuscript... Naga is not a nice roommate to live with. He never forgets and almost never forgives, he's got a bad temper when he lets it off the leash, he has a grumpy perfectionist streak which isn't exactly the stuff of frothy heroic fantasy, and he develops the kind of loyalty that makes you wish he'd find somebody else to clamp his teeth into instead. Why, yes, he actually does have a sense of humor. (Be afraid...)

He also has grand mal epilepsy seizures mixed up with vivid flashback episodes--reactions which these days we might call post-traumatic stress disorder,or PTSD. He lashes out at things and thrashes in his seizures. He's far more afraid he might hurt his friends than of being vulnerable during such episodes to a real enemy.

As the narrator, he tells the whole story in first person, which I understand John Gardner labeled as "a barbaric point of view." I'd never dream of arguing it.

He only leaves the desert, and the fight against the invaders there, to go get heavier help. He arrives in the flat, lush, civilized land of Tan rather like a bombshell exploding at court.

At the beginning of the first book, when he first arrives in Tan, Naga doesn't appear to have any friends. However, he's so startling and he's so full of surprising news that he causes major political shakeups in Tan. He's not sorry, either.

Caladrunan, Lord of Tan, sometimes called Tanman as a title, is the guy who gets to feel the pain. It's no fun putting a court back together again after somebody dumps all kinds of evidence of fraud, treason, smuggling, and embezzlement in your lap. You know, all the usual noble pursuits that actually generate serious cash. He's also aware that nobody else would thank the man who dumped this mess on the Lord's lap so blatantly it has to be dealt with. He knows exactly how many of them would just love to strangle the little bastard, if only somebody could get their hands on him long enough. Caladrunan has no intention of letting them, because he doesn't waste talent when he comes across it. He means to make full use of every last scrap of command ability he can find in our narrator, turn all that fury to good purpose. Caladrunan has made serious promises to find ways of healing the old damage that causes Naga to have flashbacks and fits, because it's the right thing to do for one of his sworn men. He's never turned his back on loyalty in his life, it's been a rare enough discovery. He knows himself, he knows he's way too fond of good music as well as intelligent argument, he knows our narrator is in danger of getting his own way too often. Caladrunan has no intention of letting our narrator realize that, and fears it's too late already.

At first, the terrain in the books looks like one of those "post-apocalyptic but still not really terribly nasty" worlds where something has happened, nobody's quite sure what, but people can still survive. Some of the animals are a little strange, and there's a curious lack of some of the more delicate species we're used to.

We of past civilizations have left these descendants huge toxic messes they can only avoid, not clean up, as well as intriguing relics of the junk we scattered around.

It's clear that people must have struggled through a lot of different problems, gradually losing one thing and then another. A lot of knowledge has been lost. Some of the luckier enclaves have begun to pick some of it again, but when they don't share it easily, their expertise is resented. Mostly, people have regressed back to near-tribal levels of political organization, feudal at best. Medicine is in a dark ages, agriculture and martial arts are using fairly crude cast iron tools.

Some of the more privileged groups who've built more advanced weapons have sense enough not to use them sloppily. Other groups have dreams of ruling the whole world, doing it up properly in the name of their religion, and not taking, "No, thank you," for an answer.

If this all sounds a bit boringly familiar, forgive me. This series began over twenty years ago, long before the current debacle in the Middle East, but well after the collapse of Saigon.

ACE asked me to break my monster up into at least two hunks of story.

I did that. Then it came out, O marvels, and I started working on any publicity I could manage on my budget. It took my editor at ACE to tell me to go to science fiction conventions and talk to people. I had no idea that people did that. A lovely discovery, as it turns out, and I advise would-be writers that while it can be expensive and frustrating to get information that way, it's also teaching you how to join a community, fit into a small town that does this kind of work, and that is a Good Thing.

Yes, I wrote the books first, and then wandered into fandom. This is backward, you know. Many people live forward in time, unlike Merlin and myself--they find fandom first, figure out it's okay to write fanfiction and draw fan art, and then they gradually do it better, and amazingly, turn pro.

Convention panels are just like a performance. Because I rarely knew if I could afford to go to any convention until the actual week of it, joining panels as a pro became rather improvisational theater. Eventually I found myself substituting onto panels where the NASA general hadn't been able to make it that day, where I tried to entertain folks by keeping the real space geeks explaining things to the rest of us. My good advice on this is to read some of the folks on your panel ahead of time if you're going to be the moderator--it makes life much easier when you're fighting the rudder against noisy folks in competition with each other, shouting over the profound silence of real pros who don't need to prove anything.

I fought to get back to my real work. When I did the rewriting for the first book and started into the second, I found it was not just two books. I had leftover bits of notebook mss left over and waving frantically to get used. (They still are, but that's jumping ahead...) That's why my two published ACE fantasy novels, Teot's War and Teot's War 2: Bloodstorm, were intended to become joined to another, in a trilogy.

Then we all got lucky.

In a belt-tightening era, ACE let go writers like a tree shedding leaves. Writers with far more books in a series than mine were freed to the winds. Well, for both ACE and the writers, it sure beats a company going bankrupt instead, and there were plenty of others that did at that point. I know some of the writers who were already serious gaming geeks anyway migrated into writing computer gaming scenarios, or working for roleplaying companies. Later on, many of them migrated off into writing mysteries and romance novels.

For me, this fell into a job gap when I became aware that I had no health care if I got sick. I had to get serious about my real life responsibilities and Get a Real Job. Amazingly, it proved possible,as I talked about earlier. It turned out regular hours just slowed me down considerably on the writing end. This is partly from being too tired to think clearly, inability to focus on anything but work problems, and also from actually learning new things that need mulling over.

I did actually get some books done, and turned them in--and got them roundly and soundly rejected. Readers have seen no evidence of it as yet, but I have several times come up with a different third book Teot series mss to submit to various companies.

Again, we all got lucky.

One thing or another has happened to prevent it being picked up. Sometimes it might have been that the story didn't stand up to the strain of starting it off as a whole new series at a new house (which is rarely done), sometimes it might have been the impact of recession on publishers. In one case, an out-of-house editor really liked it, but the company felt out-of-house editors were getting too many of *their* mss bought vs. the editors they paid in-house in NY, so who did they fire? Why, they let go of their out-of-house editors. Pause for your moment of boggling, here...Okay, now that we all have that out of our systems, onward.

My most recent submission was some years ago, to DAW. When people say DAW takes awhile, they aren't kidding, but I asked them to place it on hold for a bit. I explained that a friend of mine who was an English teacher had pointed out that the series of flashbacks in the beginning looked to her like an entire other story.

Guess what?

She was right.

So I started uncurling those flashbacks, and I wanted to finish that before I merged it back into that third book, and would they mind waiting?

They didn't mind waiting.

They also weren't terrified of the idea of picking up an old ACE series, either.

This year I went to a DAW presentation at the World Science Fiction Convention in LA, where they showed new covers and talked about upcoming series, and they seem quite comfortable with big fantasy books, with long series, and even with interrupted series like mine. A few months ago, I received a phone call asking if I was still interested in having them consider this mss. I said oh yes, indeed, and gee, umm, those flashbacks? Erm, you see, I found another novel in there. A big one. As big as what they already have, which is on the doorstop side as it is. And yes, I said earnestly, I do think the fourth book as they have it should be able to stand alone, I certainly tried very hard to write it that way, knowing it was interrupted by such a long time.

They're ruminating over it.

So this insertionary mss , uncurling flashbacks, is what I've been working on since then, while DAW ruminates over what should, in plotline terms, become the fourth book mss.

Yes, I really need to finish the inserted mss, now the third book, instead of goofing off and plastering trivial prose all over the Internet. I also think it's a much better book than any of the things I originally turned in for a third book. That's why I think I was lucky.

I've yet to prove it has a stronger ending, but I'm trying to get there. Wish me luck.

Let's regard this one as an exercise in writerly discipline, an attempt to inform people on a subject I rarely share with anybody, and almost never take time to think about.

If you are looking for more copies of my first two books, places like Other Change of Hobbit, Uncle Hugo's Bookstore, Powell's books, and your friendly local used book dealers should all be able to order copies for you. They also appear in regular eBay auctions and on Amazon secondary book dealer's lists such as Abe.com.

Thanks for your interest and your queries about when the third book may ever come out!