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sake of sticking to an out-dated gameplan.
The addition of The Battle of Vo Mimbre was a sort of afterthought. I
knew that epic fantasy derived from medieval romance, so just to
reenforce that point of origin, I wrote one. It has most of the elements of a
good, rousing medieval romance - and all of its flaws. I'm still fairly
sure that it would have made Eleanor of Aquitaine light up like a
Christmas tree.
I wanted to use it in its original form as the Prologue for Queen of
Sorcery, but Lester del Rey said, 'NO!.' A twenty-seven page prologue
didn't thrill him. That's when I learned one of the rules. A prologue does
not exceed eight pages. Lester finally settled the argument by
announcing that if I wrote an overly long prologue, he'd cut it down with
a dull axe.
Oh, there was another argument a bit earlier. Lester didn't like
'Aloria'. He wanted to call it 'Alornia'!!! I almost exploded, but my wife
calmly took the telephone away from me and sweetly said, 'Lester,
dear, "Alornia" sounds sort of like a cookie to me.' (Alon-da Doone?)
Lester thought about that for a moment. 'It does, sort of, doesn't it? OK,
Aloria it is then.' Our side won that one big-time.
I'm not passing along these gossipy little tales for the fun of it, people.
There's a point buried in most of them. The point to this one is the
importance of the sound of names in High Fantasy. Would Launcelot
impress you very much if his name were 'Charlie' or 'Wilbur'? The bride
of my youth spends hours concocting names. It was ~ and still is - her
specialty. (She's also very good at deleting junk and coming up with
great endings.) I can manufacture names if I have to, but hers are
better. Incidentally, that.'Gar' at the center of "Belgarath', "Polgara., and
'Garion' derives from proto-Indo European. Linguists have been amusing
themselves for years backtracking their way to the original language
spoken by the barbarians who came wandering off the steppes of
Central Asia twelve thousand or so years ago. 'Gar' meant 'Spear' back
in those days. isn't that interesting?
When the preliminary studies were finished, my collaborator and I
hammered together an outline, reviewed our character sketches,
and we got started. When we had a first draft of what we thought was
going to be Book I completed, I sent a proposal., complete with the
overall outline, to Ballantine Books, and, naturally, the Post Office
Department lost it. After six months, I sent a snippy note to Ballantine.
'At least you could have had the decency to say no.They replied, 'Gee,
we never got your proposal.'I had almost dumped the
whole idea of the series because of the gross negligence of my
government. I sent the proposal off again. Lester liked it, and we signed
a contract. Now we were getting paid for this, so we started to
concentrate.
Incidentally, my original proposal envisioned a trilogy - three books
tentatively titled Garion, CeNedra, and Kal Torak. That notion tumbled
down around my ears when Lester explained the realities of the
American publishing business to me. B. Dalton and Waldenbooks had
limits on genre fiction, and those two chains ruled the world. At that
time, they wanted genre fiction to be paperbacks
priced at under three dollars, and thus no more than 300 pages.