Writing:
Working on The Wanderer was a fascinating project. This was my posthumous collaboration with Cherry Wilder (1930 – 2002), who died of cancer in the late winter of '02, leaving behind a completed draft of this book, her final novel. Draft being the operative word here.
Working through Cherry's original manuscript, it was sadly clear that her capacities to focus on her work were failing as the book progressed. The first third of the book—was filled with the startling beauty and sense of wonder that I so associate with Cherry's best work. And, yes, there were flashes of brilliant writing throughout—but my work became progressively more involved after the first one hundred and fifty MS pages. I went back to her earlier Rulers of Hylor books for direction—what a great collapsing tragedy this visionary writer of great fantasy produced!
I tried to do everything in my power to honor it.
Artwork
Map-making and other craft-like illustrations this year. There just aren't enough hours in a day.
Late November: Technical problems with this website prompted the belated announcement of Katya's Reading and Signing at Dreamhaven Books on Tuesday, November 18th as part of the SPECULATIONS READINGS SERIES. SPECULATIONS is a co-production of SF MINNESOTA & S.A.S.E.—THE WRITE PLACE. FFI: eheideman @ qwest.net November: A terrific visit to Chicago for Windycon XXX, one of my favorite conventions these days because of the delirious proliferation of hall costumes, showcasing SF Conventioneers' (what a word!) fascinating creativity. February: The estate of Cherry Wilder has contracted me to work on and complete (for publication by Tor Books, edited by David Hartwell) Cherry's last novel, The Wanderer. For those of you who don't know Cherry Wilder's writing, she completed The Rulers of Hylor in the late 1980s. This wonderful fantasy trilogy includes the titles A Princess of the Chameln, Yorath the Wolf, and The Summer's King. These books completely seduced me when I first read them; rereading them now, as I prepare the final chapters of The Wanderer, I am struck afresh by just how good they are—better even than memory had served me. I never met Cherry during her lifetime, but—from my side at least—I have always felt a deep— if mysterious and oddly-amorphous—connection to her work. She has touched into my writing life at many frankly pivotal moments. I could write a lot about reading the Hylor books in college: of reading them when I was mature enough a reader to see the grand shape she'd made of connected countries and individuals' fortunes. A few months after I had started my first novel, I was in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (a 'copyright' library, which just about everything ever printed in England since the fifteenth century sitting somewhere on its shelves). For some reason, momentarily drained after ordering up yet another tall stack of the 17th and 18th century titles that related to my graduate school work, I got curious about what Cherry had written since Hylor. I ordered her most recent novel, Cruel Designs—spent an afternoon or two taking a break from working to read it. It's a strange, chilly novel. And the main character was an American woman living in Germany: Katya Reimann. As I trotted through the halls, the libraries, the country lanes, frequented by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, I didn't know then the turn my life was about to take from academia to high fantasy. But it was a sort of funny thing that Cherry was 'there with me' as I turned the corner. I sent out the MS of the book that would become Wind From a Foreign Sky soon after.
Wish I'd had a chance to meet her, outside of the pages of her lovely books.
