Then I realized that I couldn’t tell that story and only bring in the conflict with Set at the end. That had to be at the heart of the story all the way through, or it would feel tacked on, an extra element when the real story was over. As I tell my writing students, you have to promise the story you are going to end. The ending of this series is the climax of the struggle with Set. Just as the Mithermages will supercede the wars and geopolitics of the drowther world, so also the war with Set must supercede all other concerns in the minds of those few who know that it’s going on.

Once I faced that structural necessity, I realized that I was not ready to tell that story. All my thought and development had been in the world of the Mithermages, while the magery of gatemages and manmages remained nebulous and ill-formed in my mind. In order to tell this story, I needed to develop a complicated rule set. What is it, exactly, that a manmage does? Or, for that matter, a gatemage?

So instead of delivering a book, I essentially started it over—always a depressing bit of news for an editor who trusted you to deliver when you said you would. But Beth Meacham, my editor for most of my career, also understands that it’s better to deliver the best book I’m capable of than whatever book happens to be ready on the due date. Her patience is extraordinary, because the patience of editors is not passive. She has to fend off and placate marketing staff who are wondering just when (or whether) the promised book will appear; she has to make decisions about whether to go through the expensive and disappointing process of changing the publishing schedule. Fortunately, her employer and my publisher, Tom Doherty, shares the same literary values—that getting it right is more important than getting it now. My responsibility, then, is to be sure that any delay is worth it.