The S-word, continued

 

People are extraordinary.  Not always in a good way.  Before I plunge into part two of my rant I want to insert my usual disclaimer that the vast MAJORITY of my book mail—or I should say book contacts, since it includes all that on line stuff plus, when I still went to cons, face to face type comments*—is friendly, positive and courteous.  On days when the iron wall** I am repeatedly dashing myself at has developed spikes to make the dashing experience more interesting, this reader support is probably all that prevents me from taking the job as a graveyard-shift supermarket shelf restocker that I keep talking about.  Thank you to all of you.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.  I really don’t think I’d like being a graveyard-shift supermarket shelf restocker.  I’d rather go on telling stories.

Then there’s the rogue reader element.  I’ve had another easily a dozen people demanding sequels to one thing or another as immediate reaction to last night’s blog post.***  What part of ‘I can only write what I am given to write’ don’t you understand?  ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH.  Is reiterating what I’ve just told you I can’t do supposed to be cute?  Cute as roadkill.  Is it supposed to be encouraging?  Dancing on hot coals barefoot makes you hop around faster.  Are hot coals encouraging?†  So—what?  I’d write sequels if they came to me to be written.  They don’t.  There’s nothing I can do about this.  Reminding me relentlessly of my deficiencies is not a good way of getting my best work out of me.

At the opposite end of this range however are the people who have apparently taken it quietly that Robin McKinley Never Writes Sequels when they get to the end of PEGASUS.  WHAT?  I am just as mystified by this as I am by these people who go on insisting about the sequel to SUNSHINE or Damar or what have you.††  PEGASUS has to have a ‘sequel’—the story ISN’T FINISHED.  Clearly.  Well, I thought clearly.  But I get not only the outraged reactions to PEG THE FIRST . . . I also get these sad, humble, polite little notes saying, I know you don’t write sequels but the ending of PEGASUS is a little rough. . . .

LOOK.  THIS IS NOT A SPOILER.  SYLVI AND EBON GET BACK TOGETHER.  OF COURSE THEY DO.  GOOD GRIEF.  DON’T FRELLING WORRY ABOUT IT.†††

If any writer handed me-as-reader an ending like the end of PEGASUS and told me that is the end I would hunt them down and kill them, okay?  I’m pretty sure I’ve said that before, but I’m still getting mail . . . from people who manifestly don’t read this blog. ‡

So there’s PEGASUS, which has to go on with the story.  There’s SUNSHINE, which, despite all you people who think otherwise, and while it is certainly not neatly tied up with a bow and a SWAK sticker at the end, does NOT have to go on with the story.

Then there’s SHADOWS.  I admit that I got to the ending and sort of looked around and thought, uh oh.  Several of my first readers said, You do know you’re going to get bucketloads of queries about the sequel, don’t you?  And, grimly, I said, yes.  I do know.  And in this case . . . all you sequel-enquirers have a point.

But . . . I don’t know.  When I got to the end of SUNSHINE I already knew a lot about what happens after.  I knew most of the blunt answers to most of the obvious questions . . . I just didn’t know how they fit together in a story, and I still don’t know, ten years (eeep) after the book came out.  But a lot of SUNSHINE had been around in the Story Place in my head for quite a while, even though I didn’t recognise it as such till it went SHAZZAM and became SUNSHINE.  I wrote SHADOWS in what, for me, is a hurry, and more or less out of nowhere—dare I mention it had started life as a short story about a girl who hated her new stepfather, whom she suspected of doing illegal magic.  But when PEG II crashed and burned on me and I couldn’t face starting over right away with the prospect of PEG II and III looming but I also needed to keep eating . . . SHADOWS said, Pssst.  Over here.  The learning curve for me about Maggie and her world was pretty steep.  I’m still on it.

I don’t know if there will be a sequel.  Mind you, the ending of SHADOWS is fine.  It doesn’t need a sequel the way PEGASUS does.  But it’s also more open to writable possibilities than SUNSHINE is.  I don’t know.  Ask me in six months.  No, ask me in two or three years, after I’ve got PEG II and III handed in.

* * *

*  Brrrrrrr.  Real people.  Brrrrrrr.^

^ Why, in a random situation that is not a book convention or some other book-oriented activity, when you’re sitting around exchanging life info and, let’s further say, what you all do for a living—let’s say during the breaks of your Street Pastor training—and one person is a hairdresser^, this one is an accountant, that one teaches maths and physics^^, and it gets to you and you say you’re a writer, and someone says, oh, what do you write, and you say, fantasy, genre fantasy, wizards, dragons, enchanted swords, retold fairy tales and the occasional vampire, why, a good 60% of the time is the next sentence out of someone’s mouth Oh, are you published?  HOW THE RATBLASTED FRELL DO YOU THINK I EARN A LIVING IF I’M NOT PUBLISHED?  I have learnt, not without difficulty, NOT to murder these people with my bare hands, but I admit my fingers tend to flex involuntarily.

^ Or was.  SPing is popular with the still-lively retired

^^ Speaking of brrrrrrr.

** AKA ‘Story in progress [sic]’

*** There’s also some [wrestles self into submission] . . . person on Facebook the headline of whose comment begins When is the SHADOWS sequel coming? . . . I have not clicked on this to see how it continues.

† It doesn’t improve the quality of your hopping, please note.

†† Or SPINDLE, and make it all come out after all the way they thought it was supposed to and doesn’t.  Sorry.  No.  I would love to write a sequel to SUNSHINE or Seven Third Damar Novels, but if I wrote a sequel to SPINDLE the status quo would not change.

Or BEAUTY.  This of all of them confounds me the most, I think—I’ve already told you that every story I’ve ever written gets at least the occasional request for a sequel.  There is nothing to write a sequel with at the end of BEAUTY.  Even at the time I made embarrassed reference to my Technicolor ending, although now, getting on for forty years later, I still entirely support my younger self’s belief that that’s how the story goes.^  Speaking of story arcs:  that one is COMPLETE.  If I’d written a sequel it would have perforce been a whole new story with a few familiar names.

^ Warning:  overfamiliar caveat follows:  Although I wish I’d made it clear in that last looking-in-the-mirror bit that she sees she’s grown up, NOT that she’s become beautiful.  She HASN’T become ‘beautiful’.  She HAS grown up.  Sigh.

††† There’s lots of other stuff to worry about.  Just not that.^

^ Do they STAY together this time?  What does STAY TOGETHER mean?  Does anyone DIE in a fabulous tragic saving-the-universe kind of way?+

+ Mwa hahahahahahaha.

‡ Or at least if they do, when they raise their eyes from their knitting again, they miss a few lines.