Kevin's Watch

I asked, ‘So, how often have you written “Be true” in the front of a book?’ He answered that after ‘Be true’ the most common thing people ask for is ‘Stone and Sea’ – a saying of the Giants in the Chronicles. He raised his hands and shook his head a little as if to say, ‘Beats the heck out of me why’, but neither of us could think of anything else to say at that point, so he carried on signing.

Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey had very definite ideas of what Del Rey wanted from their authors. Sometimes this caused a lot of friction with their authors; Tim Powers left Del Rey and went to Ace because what he wanted to write wasn’t what Lester wanted him to write, Phyllis Eisenstein went into a multi-year stretch of writer’s block after Lester got nasty about her plans for a sequel to Sorcerer’s Son, and Lester and Stephen Donaldson were constantly feuding, to the point Judy-Lynn hired an assistant editor whose primary function at Del Rey was to keep between them and prevent Lester from driving cash-cow Donaldson to another publisher.

Do you have any stories on regrets you have on authors you turned away, who later went on to be become famous? (Kind of: drat, and we told JK Rowling that boy wizards at school would never sell).

Early in my career I rejected a 2500 page manuscript by the unknown Stephen Donaldson. Lester del Rey later bought it and edited it into three volumes.

wayfriend wrote:I found this an an author's blog (Lawrence Watt-Evans, whom I've never heard of), which mentions something I never new about the Lester/Donaldson relationship.

Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey had very definite ideas of what Del Rey wanted from their authors. Sometimes this caused a lot of friction with their authors; Tim Powers left Del Rey and went to Ace because what he wanted to write wasn’t what Lester wanted him to write, Phyllis Eisenstein went into a multi-year stretch of writer’s block after Lester got nasty about her plans for a sequel to Sorcerer’s Son, and Lester and Stephen Donaldson were constantly feuding, to the point Judy-Lynn hired an assistant editor whose primary function at Del Rey was to keep between them and prevent Lester from driving cash-cow Donaldson to another publisher.

Everything but the Kitchen Sink
http://www.watt-evans.com/blog/?p=78

Del Rey was an old-fashioned pulpster, and his definition of fantasy was not broad. He seems to have been genuinely impressed by The Lord of the Rings as an adventure story, and to have thought that all the poetry and philosophy and ‘depth’ that distinguish it from its imitators were merely gas and filler. I have been told by persons who knew him that he did not, in fact, like the Covenant books at all; but he needed material, and was not about to look three gift horses in the mouth. And he did observe what he called the ‘crypto-Christian’ elements of sacrifice and redemption in the books, though he seems not to have understood them. Del Rey seems to have despised his market for its poor taste, but he was a shrewd judge of what would sell. Like Phil Spector churning out singles for AM radio, he knew what was ‘dumb enough to be a hit’. The elements of the Thomas Covenant books that were not ‘dumb’ he regarded as regrettable but not fatal.

“The 'Gap' books, my last really big project, had only human or human-scaled characters. There was no archetypal Evil, just aliens who were going to have a destructive effect on human life, and humans who had a destructive effect on the people around them. Returning now to epic fantasy is complicated by the fact that my readers have a right to expect me to deal in archetypes. But because my priorities have shifted, in ‘The Last Chronicles' I will probably spend more time than any reader has ever expected on the motivation of the bad guy. When I wrote Lord Foul's Bane, Lord Foul the Despiser was explicitly archetypal, a sort of undying and unmotivated force for darkness. But now I believe that he too has reasons for what he does, and, more than ever before, I care about what those reasons might be. For example, I’m aware now, as I was not 20 years ago, that what this being feels is despair. He wants to hurt so many other people because he needs an outlet for his pain. He has a story, and he deserves dignity.

dlbpharmd wrote:I can't wait to read that side of the story!