Ten years ago, I quit my day job. The next Tuesday, Tor Books published Three Parts Dead.
I’ve never heard anyone with publishing experience recommend quitting your job immediately before your debut drops. I doubt I’d recommend it to a debut writer now, absent a truly staggering advance—especially if you have a job you like, that gives you satisfaction and feeds your family. But I was young, and I’d sold four books and delivered two before the first came out, for a moderate sum that added up to a bit more than the stipend for a two-year funded MFA in the United States at the time. I was contemplating going back to school anyway. So: think of it like grad school, I told myself. Two years to start your own business, change your career, build the life you’ve dreamed about. Give it a shot. Grab the brass ring. See what you can do.
Ten years later, I’m still seeing.
This anniversary snuck up on me. Between parenting, other good in-progress life changes, and being head-down on revisions for Wicked Problems, I haven’t had time to do much more than look up and think: oh! wow. I've been at this for a while…, in spite of the distinct intention to do something cool.
Ten years! A lot changes, in the world and in publishing. Three Parts Dead debuted in a genre landscape thronged with nine-volume urban fantasy series and photorealistic covers. These days that’s a slimmer category, at least in the science fiction and fantasy section of the bookstore—less so in romance. Ten years ago, it was less common in genre to talk about organizations (companies, nations, economies) as beings with complex and emergent behavior, as entities or “slow AIs”—now it’s a common enough point that people refer to the concept, as part of a common vocabulary. Ten years ago, the Tara Abernathy cover stood out. It wouldn’t these days, at least not in the same way, and I’m very happy about that.
Ten years ago, people were still saying vampires were played out. I imagine we’ll be saying that when we’re all semisentient plasma foam descending into the event horizon of Cygnus x-1.
For ten years, the Craft Sequence has kept dancing—sometimes fantasy noir, sometimes epic fantasy, sometimes cyberpunk-with-magic. As often as I’ve struggled to come up with a one-sentence elevator pitch for this series, it’s been wonderful to watch an instinct develop, among readers who love these books, for who else would. “Oh my god, you have to read these!” If you know, you know. I sometimes (thanks Twitter) get to eavesdrop on this interaction and it’s a joyful thing. (Also terrifying—I really hope the recommender is right!)
I started writing Three Parts Dead in the thick of the 2008 financial crisis, and sold it to a publishing industry reeling from the Borders collapse. I wrote it out of a need to understand—to figure out for myself how to live in a a world of complexity, awe, power, terror, danger and love, a big and dangerous and transcendently weird world that tries, with less success every year it seems, to come off as if everything’s normal, as if “normal” is even a remotely coherent concept. I saw a lot of people out there trying to find a way to live, to help, to build. That was the life I wrote about, and that’s been the life I’ve tried to live.
And now I’m about to start what I expect to be the last book in the series.
Endings are strange. Human beings like to draw edges—even on time, even on life—but the edges we find pleasant and useful don’t have much to do with what’s really, cosmically, going on. The beat goes on, as the guy says, dadadum-dadum-da-da. The sort of work the Craft Sequence is about, trying to do the best you can in a tangled place, it’s not the sort of work where any one person gets to tie a bow on it and say ‘it’s done.’
But I started this work ten years ago, and so did Tara and Abelard and Ms. K and Temoc and Caleb and Kai. We’re all different people now, and the world is different too—the world in which these stories are told, and the world about which they are told—and that’s worth holding up to the light. It’s worth more than that. It’s worth stress-testing: asking, in really direct and dramatic ways, who these people have become, what lessons have they learned, and where will they go next. That’s the spirit with which I’ve approached this final arc of books. It’s an honor, and it’s a privilege, and it’s damn fun.
To end a thing is to make a strong claim about what it is. But while I have my hopes and notions, these people with their lives and their adventures aren’t just figments of my imagination. I’ve set the table and opened the doors and adjusted the lights and turned on the music and arranged for improvisational theater. I set the agenda, introduced the games and the major players, but a party needs guests.
I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this without your support. You’ve read the books, re-read them, you’ve played the games, you’ve passed them all around, you’ve drawn art and written fic I haven’t read, and you’ve written letters. I’ve met some of you; I want to thank all of you. Thank you. It’s been an adventure—and there are many more adventures to come.
The books in the Craft Sequence span space and time weaving resonant narratives. I look forward to reading about these characters again, how they have aged, who comes together and what adventures they go on together. Thanks for bring us on your journey, Max!
You are brilliant, funny and amazing. Thank you for letting us share in your journey.