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elephant. You'll probably notice the time lapse. I was forty before I
wrote a publishable book. A twenty-five year long apprenticeship
doesn't appeal to very many people.
The first thing a fantasist needs to do is to invent a world and
draw a map. Do the map first. If you don't, you'll get lost, and picky
readers with nothing better to do will gleefully point out your
blunders.
Then do your preliminary studies and character sketches in great
detail. Give yourself at least a year for this. Two would be better.
Your 'Quest', your 'Hero', your form of magic, and your 'races' will
probably grow out of these studies at some point. If you're worried
about how much this will interfere with a normal life, take up
something else. If you decide to be a writer, your life involves sitting at
your desk. This is what you do to the exclusion of all else, and there
aren't any guarantees. You can work on this religiously for fifty
years and never get into print, so don't quit your day-job.
It was about the time that we finished Book Iii of the Belgariad
that we met Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey in person. We all had
dinner together, and I told Lester that I thought there was more story
than we could cram into five books, so we might want to think about
a second set. Lester expressed some interest. Judy-Lynn wanted to
write a contract on a napkin. How's that for acceptance?
We finished up the Belgariad, and then went back into
'preliminaries' mode. Our major problem with the Malloreon lay in the fact
that we'd killed off the Devil at the end of the Belgariad. No villain;
no story. The bad guys do have their uses, I suppose. Zandramas, in
a rather obscure way, was a counter to Polgara. Pol, though central
to the story as our mother figure, had been fairly subordinate in the
Belgariad, and we wanted to move her to center stage. There are
quite a few more significant female characters in the Malloreon than
in the Belgariad. Zandramas (my wife's brilliant name) is Torak's
heir as 'Child of Dark'. She yearns for elevation but I don't think
becoming a galaxy to replace the one that blew up was quite what
she had in mind. The abduction of Prince Geran set off the
obligatory quest, and abductions were commonplace in medieval romance
(and in the real world of the Dark Ages as well), so we were still
locked in our genre.
We had most of our main characters - good guys and bad guys
already in place, and I knew that Mallorea was somewhere off to the
east, so I went back to the map-table and manufactured another
continent and the bottom half of the one we already had. We got a
lot of mileage out of Kal Zakath. That boy carried most of the
Malloreon on his back. Then by way of thanks, we fed him to
Cyradis, and she had him for lunch.
I'll confess that I got carried away with The Mallorean Gospels. I
wanted the Dals to be mystical, so I pulled out all the stops and
wrote something verging on Biblical, but without the
inconveniences of Judaism, Christianity~ or Mohammedanism. What it all
boiled down to was that the Dals could see the future, but so could
Belgarath, if he paid attention to the Mrin Codex. The whole story
reeks of prophecy - but nobody can be really sure what it means.
My now publicly exposed co-conspiratress and I have recently
finished the second prequel to this story~ and now if you want to
push it, we've got a classic twelve-book epic. If twelve books were
good enough for Homer, Virgil, and Milton, twelve is surely good
enough for us. We are not going to tack on our version of the Odyssey
to our already completed Iliad. The story's complete as it stands.
There aren't going to be any more garion stories. Period. End of
discussion.