I like fluff.
Yes, I cop to it, and cheerfully. The scenes where characters gossip about one another; the ones where they cuddle, have spats, decide what to wear or eat or bake, reflect on their experiences. The scenes where we see the exact same events, but from a less pivotal character’s viewpoint. The scenes that don’t fit into books because they interrupt the pacing, or get cut from books because they’re deemed irrelevant. I love all these things.
And since I don’t think I’m all that different from other people, I figured you all love them too.
Goodness, but did you prove that assumption out.
Major Pieces started as an experiment… an excuse for me to write the scenes I had to omit and that I secretly wanted to write anyway. I picked Princes’ Game as my target because that series involves events so large that the small stuff had to fall out—particularly near the end, when we couldn’t afford to linger on every interpersonal moment between members of an enormous cast. I thought… ‘wouldn’t it be fun to see what people want to hear more about?’ and ‘wouldn’t it be fun to play?’ So I made a short list of possible scenes, asked for your input on adding to it, and then asked you to vote on what you wanted, and to fund any extras.
Which you did, extravagantly enough to pay for a second novel of nothing but slice-of-life scenes, the forthcoming Heartskein.
Aletsen, you hold in your hands an extraordinary volume for which you are wholly responsible. Not just by providing the scene list, because I only came up with one or two of those without brainstorming with you, but also the money to make writing this a viable use of my time. You even participated in the drafts with your edits, suggestions, and questions. I picked the title—Major Pieces—as a play on the name of the series, Princes’ Game; in chess, the major pieces are those capable of checkmate without support, and most of these vignettes concern the principal characters of the books. But this project became a game of its own, between the readers and the author, and in that game, you are the major pieces who made the project possible, and shaped its course. Your glorious endgame during the Kickstarter campaign is something I’ll never forget, and I have never been more delighted to concede.
Had you not involved yourselves, I might never have written more than one or two of these, and thought myself alone in my pleasure over the little interstitials that almost never see the page. But you did involve yourselves, and how glad I am that you did. I hope, reading, that you are too.
Aletsen, thank you. Enjoy.