The Last Dark Release Date

[I'm Murrin]

That is a pretty horrifically written synopsis. I hope it's not Donaldson's.

[Savor Dam]

SRD could not write that poorly.

[Mega Fauna Blitzkrieg]

Did 300 pages really get cut, or was that Orlion person just making that all up?

9XX pages for the third draft, 688 for the release? I wanna know what these cuts were! Hasn't he written enough best sellers by now to ward off excessive editing and "input"?!

I mean it seems pretty clear that Wheel of time guy had no supervision after book 3.

This is 300 pages that could have been the Esmer/Mhoram spin-off that we've all been bloody waiting for! The one where they go to fight crime in the big city of Mithil Stonedown, while raising their adopted child Dukkha.

!@#$%

[Savor Dam]

I've done some rather draconian cutting, all of which I believe was necessary. I deliberately wrote the first draft *long* because I wanted to be sure that I didn't leave anything out. But the result was an unusually high number of repetitions and digressions; and weeding them out--while creating more effective or at least more efficient alternatives--has been a very long and arduous challenge.

[Mega Fauna Blitzkrieg]

Well apparently I just see what I want to see.

Anyways, I still maintain that 300 pages of SRD's repetitions and digressions would be far more !@#$ing relevant and well done than 1200 pages of what many authors try to pass off as books!

I actually consider SRD's book lengths to be somewhat miraculous, I don't know how he accomplishes so much with comparatively so little. Is this just because he is that much better as a writer than his peers? Or because most authors of 'series' appear to be trying to milk them into a !@#$ing 'franchise' on which they can 'retire'?

But since this is the last book, I want longer so it doesn't end! I guess I can just get 80% through it and then stop reading, then it won't ever end!

[Romeo]

All of the Last Chronicles reduced in size a lot from the first to final drafts. But they were no "cuts' made like with Gilden Fire. It was all just tightening up the writing.

[Orlion]

There's a difference between manuscript pages and published pages, particularly since publishers will want to reduce the amount of paper used to save costs. I imagine margins, font, size, etc. are all different and all subject to change. Also, there might be double spacing between lines in a manuscript to facilitate note taking.

[Mega Fauna Blitzkrieg]

Tell them to save costs on paper with other writers!

Ahem, but seriously...this is the second post in 5 minutes that mentions Gilden Fire as something that was removed or retconned or foreshadowed and never added...which makes a total of 2 times in my life that I have heard of Gilden Fire?

What exactly is it? The name sounds pretty self explanatory, so actually what I mean is, what is the story behind it?

[Akasri]

From Wikipedia:

The story "Gilden-Fire" first appeared as an independent novella, but is most widely available as a part of most versions of the Donaldson short story collection, Daughter of Regals, 1985.[2] It was set during the action of The Illearth War, and covers an episode from the doomed mission to contact the Giants. Gilden-Fire is told from the point of view of Korik, the senior Bloodguard on the mission. It describes Korik's selection of the mission's Bloodguard, then narrates the mission's passage through Grimmerdhore forest, where they defeat an ambush of ur-viles and kresh (wolves). The narrative ends as the mission leaves the forest.

Whether Gilden-Fire can be considered the series canon is open to debate, as per the author's foreword. Gilden-Fire was originally part of a larger, planned section of The Illearth War that followed the mission to the Giants in "real time", but was cut due to space restrictions as well as point-of-view inconsistency with the rest of the Chronicles. The events during the trek through Grimmerdhore are not mentioned in the published narrative of The Illearth War; indeed, one passage in The Illearth War suggests that the crossing was uneventful. Some information shared here on the origin and motivation of the Bloodguard does appear in other contexts in the published Chronicles. The rest of the mission after the Grimmerdhore passage was included in the Chronicles, via the narrative device of Bloodguard messengers.

[dlbpharmd]

Despite it's non-canon status, Gilden-Fire is a "must read" for any serious SRD fan.

[Mega Fauna Blitzkrieg]

If it is in Daughter of Regals then I probably have read it, or did I read Mirror of her dreams? I've had all 3 of those books for years, but I just never got around to reading them, not sure why.

Oh yes I am, a lot of my books were packed up for years, until very recently.

So does this mean that the dream I had last night about Mhoram and Bannor moving to Seattle, adopting a child and trying to 'have it all' in the big city, is also non-canon?