One of her first notes to Salvatore was about his characters. He had used some of Doug Niles’s characters and settings in his pitch, and they all had to be removed. He had to write a new corner of the Realms. She wanted to differentiate the Forgotten Realms books from the Dragonlance books that had come before. The Dragonlance saga was about a central group of heroes, and whenever novels strayed from them, sales suffered. The Forgotten Realms, though, was a gigantic world. Authors could claim pieces of the geography and develop them with their own characters and stories. The company could then
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