About Mapping Winter

Also, a post someone pointed me to … I think Sandstone on Twitter, but not sure … I was pretty much away from internet access during the past couple of weeks, so it’s been a bit difficult to post things in a timely fashion.

But!

Here is Marta Randall’s own post about re-issuing the new version of her Sword of Winter as the new Mapping Winter.

Keep in mind that I really liked the original version. Granted that I read that when it first came out, in 1983, when I was a teenager; I was not likely to say OH, THIS AGAIN when I hit a cliche. Randall herself was disgusted by the pat ending she was pushed to include:

The worst insult was what I was forced do to my characters. Lyeth rescues, and is in turn rescued by, a boy and over the course of the novel she comes to love and cherish him, so that a threat to his life is what drives the book’s conclusion. That was not enough for the editor, who insisted that I turn the boy into a “hidden prince” – you know, that cliched figure who suddenly and with no grounding is revealed to be The Most Important Person, The Answer to All the Questions, end of story. By this time it was more than obvious that the editor had no respect for my work and refused to devote any of his precious and much-lauded editorial talent on it. Harried and almost at my wit’s end, I shoehorned a prince into the book, the editor accepted it, and the book was published at the precise moment that the publisher’s sf/fantasy line imploded. …

If you’re interested, click through and read the whole thing.

If you never read the original book, it’s still available as a used book via Amazon. I do think it would be interesting and fun to read both versions in quick succession.

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