It is strange to look back on the very first novel, written in the dark ages (before e-books.) Rather like stumbling over a box of high school pictures. You know you are somewhere inside that half-fledged bird of a person, but on several levels you’d like to make sure that the pictures never come to light again. Fire Sanctuary made me a Campbell nominee for best new writer, and brought me to the attention of the science fiction world. A lot of people enjoyed the book.
I enjoyed the book, both the creation of the world and the writing. Fire Sanctuary began with an image and a scrap of a news article. I’d always been fascinated by the Time-Life book on genetics. One photo especially intrigued me, of a man holding a radish that looked several yards long. What would happen in a place where things not only survived, but eventually thrived among radiation? And then there was the tiny article about wiring a battery to a bone break to speed healing. What if the myth of the healing hands of a ruler was true? No placebo effect—touch could quickly heal wounds?
From these two things, all of Nuala was born.
I remember Nuala differently, of course. The original novel was about 250,000 words, at a guess—a sprawling intergalactic tale that covered the collapse of a rotting interstellar alliance and one world’s new beginning. When it became apparent that I could not sell such a book in the market of the time, I started cutting and editing, refining, teaching myself to write fiction with a tighter lens. Friends would encourage, nudge, occasionally pretend they didn’t know me (it was embarrassing back then, having a friend who admitted she wrote things) and wait for the next installment.
Even the version in your hand started out differently, with Teloa’s nightmare. Editor Brian Thomsen asked me to put Lyte and Moran first, then Teloa, as he saw them as more important characters. (He also stripped the last of that huge saga, which started 100 pages earlier. Braan and Roe’s siblings became vague shadows, not people we had met and suddenly lost. An excellent point—just because we can learn all those names doesn’t mean we should learn all those names.)
But I had to go back in and do the copy editing done by the original Warner editor, matching the copy edit of the previous Nuala e-books. In the first Warner book, the copy editor changed most of my Initial Cap choices and made them lower case—and made the lower case Nualan words Initial Cap. I was young and easily intimidated by grammar, so I allowed most of this. I even turned in Fires of Nuala matching the copy editing of Fire Sanctuary.
Of course the new copy editor made the Initial Cap choices in Fires of Nuala lower case, and made the lower case Nualan words Initial Cap. (Yes, we are now back to what the original manuscript of Fire Sanctuary contained.) By the time Hidden Fires showed up, I did what I wanted and fiercely STETed (I.E. “put the item back to what it was before you mucked with it”) every Initial Cap change the copy editor attempted. Do they all match now? Heaven only knows. But you can see why it is hard for me to keep it in my head. I remember too many versions, and other things have interfered with a smooth edit flow.
It’s hard to go back through a book this old. You are no longer the person who wrote it. You have time traveled, and the book has traveled separately from you. A writer hopes that s/he is a better writer, a better storyteller, each time a story pops out of the subconscious to become a novel. For Fire Sanctuary’s e-book I was blessed with a friend who kept mentally slapping my hand and saying, “No! It’s a good book. Don’t mess with it.”
She’s right, of course. This book can stand on its own merits. The culture is older than the other Nualan books, the viewpoint style different to match their more mannered, ancient language. (Not as changed a language as it would have been—the copy editor kept altering the ways I consciously changed the language. I lost that battle. But something like thirty-five percent of the Magna Carta is unintelligible to most English speakers today, and that’s less than a thousand years. The Chinese can still read their written language, but the meaning of many words and concepts has shifted radically over the centuries. How big a shift in five thousand years? The book has to make sense to us here, so I hung on to a few things and let the rest go.)
There’s the problem, too, that it’s not just the style of writing that has evolved along the way. There is the choice of what elements of the story to highlight and what to down-pedal. The writer I am today would write a different book. I was quite rebellious about this, and almost yanked the book from the schedule.
That is, I was quite rebellious until I recognized something quite startling (to me) about my work. I knew that healers and healing were a theme I revisited often, because I had noticed things about medicine and people healing, or not healing, that appear in the Nuala books, the Alfreda books, and in an unpublished fantasy series currently called Talismindd.
What I had not yet consciously noticed was that my published work also contains a lot about betrayal, forgiveness and second chances. The works I am currently laying out also contain a lot about betrayal, forgiveness, healing, and second chances.
There is a line in a famous poem about returning to where we started and recognizing the place for the first time. I was so certain I no longer recognized the person who wrote Fire Sanctuary. In truth, she has been with me all along.
Maybe the mystics are correct, and we arrive in this world with everything we need to address what we are here to do. Twenty-five years after this book first appeared, I look back on the child who wrote it and wonder that she could write it. I think on all that I have learned since about betrayal, forgiveness, healing, and second chances. And I realize that I don’t need to change more than a few sentences in Fire Sanctuary. It says what I wanted to say back then, a science fiction novel containing so many of the things that I loved about science fiction.
The forthcoming stories will talk about new things that I’ve learned, and still hope to learn ... with grace notes about betrayal, forgiveness, healing and second chances.
Current challenges would have made this e-book launch infinitely more difficult without the expert help of Vonda N. McIntyre, P. G. Nagle, Amy Sterling Casil, Jennifer Stevenson and Don Dixon. I offer my heartfelt thanks for their generosity with their time and expertise.
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel
February 26, 2011