Hi, folks! Just one topic this week: How I got started as a writer.
The question arose because I was driving around with my daughter today,
and she asked, “What was the first book you wrote?”
I realized that it’s actually a complicated question. Is it
the one I actually wrote first? The first one I sold? Or the first book to
actually be printed and distributed? Those are three different answers. So,
here’s the story!
I wrote a handful of short stories in college, mostly for
creative writing classes. The first novel I wrote was an epic fantasy called Kingslayer, which I started in the fall
of 1988 (shortly after I graduated college). As a longtime devourer of all
things fantasy and sci-fi, I felt that I could write the sort of books I liked
to read, so with the confidence of youth I set about it. I was an ensign in the Navy at the time, and I
made writing my book into my hobby. When I finished it, I sent it off to a
literary agency that charged me $600 to read it. (I was pretty wet behind the
ears and back before the internet it was harder to figure out how to start
doing things.) They said they saw potential, but declined to represent me and
suggested that rather than trying to rework the story, I ought to set it aside
and try something new. With some reluctance, I set aside the book—although a year
later I showed it to Jim Ward at TSR during my job interview to prove
that I could write a lot of words and see things through. I never asked Jim if
that was a difference-maker in my hiring or not, but I did wind up with the
job!
Working as a designer at TSR, I soon learned that the Book
Department occasionally opened up novel auditions to the R&D types. I took
a shot or two at various opportunities that came around, but no luck. Then, in
1993, I got a chance to design a whole new D&D world – Cerilia, the world
of the Birthright campaign setting. I pestered the Book Department for months
about writing a novel to go with the RPG release. They passed me up, going with
Simon Hawke instead. But a few months later, Brian Thomsen (managing editor of TSR's Book Department) decided to give me a
shot. I got a contract, and I knocked out my first professional novel: The Falcon and the Wolf.
That turned out okay, so TSR’s Books team gave me a second
Birthright novel: The Shadow Stone. That
turned out quite well, in my humble opinion: On my third try, I think I wrote a
pretty good book. By the middle of 1996, things were looking up for my writing
career. I had two books in the pipeline for publication, and I was hungry for
more.
Then TSR stopped printing things. I mean, everything. The
entire production line of games and books was put on hold as the company’s
difficulties deepened into a complete death spiral. Months went by, and neither
of my Birthright books saw print. If you’re acquainted with the history of the
gaming hobby, you know that Wizards of the Coast (working through Ryan Dancey
and Five Rings Publishing) purchased TSR. In the spring of 1997, many business
meetings were held, and the fate of TSR’s various lines and properties was
determined. The first few books in the Birthright book line hadn’t done well,
so the decision was made to kill the line outright, with both my novels still
waiting to be printed. To put it another way: My first two novels, complete and
ready for printing, were canceled in the same meeting.
(Brian Thomsen did something damned decent then—he excused himself from that meeting, and came
and told me in person so that I wouldn’t hear of it through the rumor mill.)
So, by the summer of 1997, I’d finished up something like
400,000 words of novels, and I had nothing but two small kill fees to show for
it. I was getting kind of discouraged.
Later that year I moved out to the Seattle area with
a bunch of the other TSR creative types, and I went to work for Wizards of the
Coast. A few months later, Peter Archer (my editor from The Shadow Stone) approached me with another opportunity: The Double Diamond Triangle Saga, a group of
nine novellas modeled after Stephen King’s Green
Mile “chapbooks.” They needed someone to write book #8, Easy Betrayals. So I immersed myself in
the story materials they’d put together up to that point, and knocked out the
novella Easy Betrayals. That ended up
becoming my first published novel, debuting in 1998.
After Easy Betrayals,
Peter Archer suggested taking The Shadow
Stone and converting it to a Forgotten Realms novel. It required a
top-to-bottom rewrite and a ton of work to make it a Realms book, but I wound
up with a decent Realms novel. From there I got a chance to do a book for the
Alternity science-fiction line: Zero
Point, published in 1999. (Zero Point
remains my only sci-fi book; I mean to do something about that soon.) Then I
got a chance to return to the Forgotten Realms with City of Ravens. That was an odd duck, because the Book team was
obligated for some reason or another to set a novel in Raven’s Bluff, the home
of the RPGA’s Living City campaign. Creating a story that fit in such a densely
detailed locale and touched on the major storylines of the campaign was pretty
challenging, but it worked: City of
Ravens is one of my best.
Following City of
Ravens, I got the opportunity to join in R.A. Salvatore’s War of the Spider Queen. My contribution
was Condemnation, the third book in
the series—and (just barely) a New York Times bestseller in 2003. That led to The Last Mythal trilogy, and then the Blades of the Moonsea trilogy. Finally,
I returned to Raven’s Bluff and the roguish Jack Ravenwild in 2012 with my
novel Prince of Ravens. To my intense
disappointment, Wizards of the Coast elected to publish that only as an e-book;
their publishing business was in disarray at the time, and they didn’t know what to do with
the book.
On the bright side, I’ve got a new book I’m looking to sell
in now, and a start on the book that will come after that one. It’s a strange
business and it is very far from stable… but I guess I’m still in the game. So that’s
the story of how my writing career has unfolded so far!
