Foreword to the 2012 revision.
This is a very big book, bigger than most three-book trilogies, yet most of my readers tended to blast through it in the shortest time possible, and then plead for the sequel. (Which is finally available!) Many who read it in earlier editions have complimented me on the rich detail, as well as the compelling action. However, a few with less patience had pointed out that there were four conversations that; while revealing interesting information, could still be removed without impacting the storyline any. Therefore, in previously published editions of this book, those four conversations were removed from the main text and placed at the end as excerpts.
Since then, the majority of my fans have vindicated my original editing and recommended that the exerpts be put back into the main text. With this edition I have done so.
Many who liked the book otherwise complained that there was too much detail, but just as many complimented me for including as much rich detail as I have, so I haven't changed that.
Whenever I release a new book in a series, I always go over the previous books in that series and check them again for editing and consistency, and re-issue them. No matter how many times I re-edit a novel, it seems there are always a few more tiny puntuation or sentence structure improvements to be made, and my fans sometimes point out small inconsistencies that I also correct at the next revision. Therefore this revision is a little different from the last, but beyond having replaced the exerpts it would take a sharp eye to find the differences. One of them is a more modern version of the Times New Roman font.
The fact that this book is not divided into chapters in not an omission, it’s a carefully considered stylistic choice.
Other elements of my style that the reader should note are my use of italics to indicate quoted sentences that are telepathically or psionicly communicated. For example;
“It’s wonderful to be able to think with you, mind-to-mind.” she responded.
I use the same MS Word files for both eBooks and paper books, and paper book printers don’t like bold or underlined text, so I also use italics occasionally to indicate words that are spoken with intensity. For example;
“You are absolutely out of your mind!” he growled.
If a sentence is already italicized bcause it’s a telepathic communication, any words in that sentence that are communicated with extra intensity will be indicated by being non-italicized, for example;
“That’s all a bunch of crap, and you know it.” she psionically repremanded him.
I use ALL CAPITALS occasionally to indicate yelling or great loudness, whether the words are spoken or telepathic; volume and intensity being distinct qualities.
In this story, many common words are also the names of magic spells, such as Sending, Flight, and Speaking, or have traditionally had highly religious connotations like The Source, and those words are capitalized to indicate this.
Since languages began, they have constantly changed and evolved. The advents of written language and printing both slowed language evolution, but it still goes on. Sometimes the resulting conventions that make up ‘proper English’ don’t make a lot of sense, and they are slightly different in every English-speaking country. In most of these cases I’ve caved and used the conventions anyway in order to avoid irritating my readers who are sensitive about these things, like writing ‘seven thousand, three hundred and fifty-five’. It makes no sense that the compound words for numbers up to one hundred are hyphenated, like fifty-five, and the others aren’t, like three thousand. But I go with it anyway.
However, there are some English conventions that I absolutely refuse to follow because they distort the emotional connotations of the writing. I’ll point out the most common one here so that you’ll know that it’s not a mistake; I’m doing it on purpose. If a quoted sentence is a question or an exclamation, it is conventionally written as a complete sentence within quotations, for example;
“Get down!” she yelled. Or;
“Is that right?” he asked.
However if a sentence that would normally end in a period is a quotation, correct English says that it should be ended with a comma. For example;
“I live here,” he said.
But the comma makes it a sentence fragment rather than a complete sentence, and leaves the reader hanging, giving a different emotional feel to the writing compared to the way I would write it, which is;
“I live here.” he said.
I only use a comma to end a quotation if it truly is a sentence fragment, because the sentence was interupted where a comma would normally go. For example;
“I live here,” he said, “And you’re not welcome.”
I suppose in that case I shouldn’t capitalize the word ‘and’, since it’s not really the first word in a sentence, but it bugs me if I don’t.
There are a few other conventions that I don’t follow, so if you see what would normally be considered a writing mistake that is repeated consistently in every possible instance in the book, you’ll know that I’m doing that on purpose too.
It’s hard to change what is considered Correct English, but I hope that other writers who read my books will agree with me about these points and do the same in their own writing, and that eventually doing it our way will be correct.
Coming this spring to my website!
*A new rotatable 3D map of the globe of Kellaran with much more detail and showing every place that is mentioned in the series.
*A complete list of major characters with descriptions.
*A timeline of major Kellarani historical events.
*And an appendix of encyclopedic facts and figures about Kellaran.
Wayne Edward Clarke, January 20, 2012.
