From: Raymond E. Feist
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 09:10:12 -0800
Subject: Re: Are you there Mr. Feist
Probably not. If you mean go back and do a story that takes place between existing books. The novlizations of the games will be as close as I get in that. The reasons are I don't care to do "prequels" and I tend to talk about important things (to me) in the context of the stories I'm working on. So when someone says, "Are you going to do a book about the Chaos Wars?" the answer is "every book that talks about the Chaos Wars is a book about it." The novelizations gives me the chance to write more Jimmy/Arutha/Pug stories from the earlier epoch, without breaking that rule, because I'm not dreaming up these adventures in a vacuum. Rather it's a way for non-game players to get a view of that particular story.
From: Raymond E. Feist
Date: Tue, 05 Mar 1996
Subject: Re: In general, most writers don't care to hear what other people think we should write.
It's not a "Who cares what you think" so much as "where were you at 3 am when I was screaming at my word-processor?" Given the time change, you were probably at work. In any event, I don't like "going back" and generally resent it. For example, Bernard Cornwall, a writer who I enjoy greatly, has a series of stories about a man named Richard Sharp, who rose to greatness during the Napoleonic War. His last book in the series is really about the 4th or 5th in the time-line, and had I read them as they came out, I'd have been bugged.
Two reasons
1) unless he's detailing things he's already mentioned in the characters past he created a situation where he must either
a) have a bunch of events where NO impact is registered on the character, which makes the story (IMHO) by definition trivial or
b) put things into the character which were not there in "later" books. It would be like me going back and writing a story before _Prince_ in which Locklear suddenly develops sensitivity toward women; you'd say, "Where did that go in Prince?"
2) I know who's going to be around in the "later" books. It's like knowing that Pug is alive in _Prince_; no matter how much he's at risk in a book set between _Darkness_ and _Prince_, you know he's going to live because he's been seen alive and well in _Prince_.
From: Raymond E. Feist
Date: 15 March 1999
Subject: Re: Magician Prequel?
I don't like prequels, because of what they do to your constraints to characters you know survive to the series already written. I'm doing the Krondor franchise purely for the pleasure of integrating the game material in the existing cannon, rather than saying, "They don't count." But I doubt I'll ever write anything before Magician.
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