The 5th Book in the Chtorr Series
♦ A Method For Madness ♦
In the past year, I’ve had four major writing spurts. The total number of words finished is now more than 250,000 words, not counting all the stuff that will go between the chapters.
And until July 4th weekend, it was my expectation that book five, A Method For Madness would end up the biggest book in the series. With another 50,000 words left to write, it looked like it would top out at 300,000 words.
But my publisher, Tom Doherty of Tor Books, said that this could present production problems, and suggested that I might want to think about breaking the book into two volumes. At first, I was resistant to the idea. I didn't see any logical place to break the narrative, and I really did want this to be a big book. But then, as I let the idea percolate, I began to see that it might work very well indeed.
Breaking book five into two books is not unusual. When book three grew too long, I broke it into books three and four. When book four grew too long, I broke it into books four and five. So, I walked myself around the block, tried the idea on for size, came back to the computer, and diddled with the files for a bit, to see if it would work, and...
There are now 166,000 words of A Method For Madness finished, plus 30,000 words of interstitials (the little asides between the chapters), and another 66,000 words finished on book six, A Time For Treason. Plus a few chapters for book seven, as well. The 66,000 words I took off the end of book 5 were better suited in book 6 — where I could expand them the way they needed to be expanded. The remaining 166,000 words of book 5 will still grow to about 210,000 before I’m done, and it will be as fully fleshed out as it should have been in the first place. My mistake was trying to fit too much into the one book in the first place. This is better. You’ll see. (Plus, it gives me a head start on book six.)
In A Method For Madness, Jim finally gets to go deep down inside the Amazon mandala -- not just what’s on the surface, but what’s underneath as well. And then, later on, in A Time For Treason, he gets to discover what’s under Manhattan as well. The parallels and contrasts between the two sequences have been a lot of fun to write. But it’s also a lot of hard work too, especially trying to keep all the details consistent. I’m exhausted just thinking about the parts left to write.
Oh yes, and there’s also this one sequence where Jim finally explains what’s really going on with the worms. That’s worth a couple of “Yikes!” It brought me out of my chair a couple of times as I realized some additional implications of the invasion.
The bad news is that I’ve given up trying to predict when all this will be done. It'll be done when it's done. I'd like to say this year, but I've said that before too. Be patient, these things are hard to write.
