That's Theamh trying to explain to the Cretid ambassador why it would in fact be neither possible nor advisable to develop and market a line of "magic-driven products and services." In the end, I guess, it's also a pretty good description of the impasse that has been reached between my desire to get these books to readers and my desire not to have to change them to suit the whims of the industry.
I have tried. Since I finished Taken Child--which was in 1996 or 1997--I've been working off and on to try to get WOF published. I've gotten farther than a lot of people, and yet it does not seem as if I am likely to get far enough. A number of agents have expressed interest in Taken Child based on the query and opening chapters; none of them were willing to try to sell the book after they'd finished reading it. The problem? It's too long, it's too complicated, and there's too much backstory.
The first agent who read it was fixated on the word count alone; and objectively speaking, she was right to be. The industry likes books to be in the 120,000 word range; Taken Child started life at 275,000 words and at its shortest it could only get down to 182,000. The version I send out online is about 250,000 words. The story on length is that long books cost more to print, which means they are priced higher, and publishers do not feel that people are likely to pay more than a certain amount of money for a book from an unknown author. If I were J.K. Rowling, I could sell Taken Child in a hearbeat. But since I'm nobody in particular, the length appeared to her to be an insurmountable problem.
The second agent who read it was dismayed by the mixture of elements from the mystery genre and the fantasy genre. Well, to each his own.
After the second agent bagged me, I finished the series, and then went back and wrote Better To Burn, which is 120,000 words long. I sent it to the first agent who had read Taken Child; she liked it and agreed to start sending it out. Unfortunately, it was rejected by all the editors who read it. So after that, I was back to looking for another agent.
The third agent who read Taken Child felt that the length was the symptom, not the disease; and that the disease, so to speak, was the amount of backstory attached to the characters. She recommended revising it so that the characters don't have such complicated prior histories, which would cut down on the amount of exposition I had to do. Again, objectively speaking, she's right; that would be the only way to get the length down, and it would make the book simpler and easier for people to follow. But alas, here is where the industry and I reached the impasse.
If all I wanted was to be published, it would make sense to make those changes. It would make the book easier to sell, and probably make it a better product. But to me, Taken Child isn't a product. I don't just want to sell a book, I want people to read this story and meet these people and go to this place. If I can't sell the book without using different people and telling a different story, then I can't sell the book. So that's the end of the story.
It's not about "artistic integrity" or anything as grandiose and pompous as that. It's just about what I want from writing, and what I want for the books. I like writing because it makes me happy, because it allows me to share parts of myself that are not easily lured out into the light of day with people who would probably not otherwise know about them, and because it makes other people happy. What I want for the books is for them to be read by people who will love them the way they are. So at this point, it makes sense to just keep trying to do this one brain at a time, and stop fantasizing about the book tour and the appearance on Fresh Air and the movie and the merchandising. When I've satisfied the demands of the day job, I'll probably write more books in the series; and maybe one of them will happen to be both a book I can love and a product I can sell. Till then, I'm out of the business.
In the end, these books are about magic, and in this universe magic, like love, has to be a gift freely given. Maybe that's just how this story has to be--given for free to anyone who asks for it. And as long as people keep asking for it, that'll be enough for me.
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