Michelle Sagara

At least, I'm assuming it's Cassandra Chan. She's a mystery writer, whose first book will be out in 2005, and I'm really looking forward to it -- although I'm not sure under what name, or even title . It's with St. Martin's, though.

Yes, this is me. The title will be The Young Widow by Cassandra Chan, and it's coming out in August 2005 (same month as your Luna book!).

The big surprise in that book was Jewel and her den; I hadn't expected them to so thoroughly run off with their section of book. I wanted a way of showing what was happening in the Empire when Stephen and Gilliam arrived, and that was best shown with her. But… she wouldn't let go of me, or the book, and she became entwined in the politics & the conflict almost immediately in ways that I had not only not planned, but hadn't even considered when I was building world.

I think my question really had more to do with the backstory of characters than what they do within the novel itself. Most writers (or at least a lot of them) have had the experience of a character that decided to do something quite different than what they had envisioned when they started writing. What struck me about the Strider example was that JRRT had no idea who the character was at all. You knew who Jewel was when you introduced her--you just didn't realize what she was going to insist on doing once you started writing about her. For myself, if I had been writing LOTR (and don't I wish!), Strider would have appeared because I suddenly saw the character in my mind. Perhaps not fully-formed, but I would have known he was a man, with certain abilities, and I think at least part of the whole Ranger thing would have come to me. I might not have known he was descended from kings, or what further role he was going to play, but Strider would never have appeared in the first place if I didn't have a pretty good idea about him.

As for taxing the patience of your readers: not a bit of it! I don't think I would have loved the Sun Sword Series so much if it had not been for the sudden, unexpected (to me) branchings it took. The Shining Court, for example--I knew there would be something about Jewel and Avandar because, after all, you had to get them to the Dominion. But I never expected the trip to take half a book, or to happen the way it did, and it was all the more wonderful for that.

I have a different question, though. I've always wondered about writing mysteries because I have a sense that things have to be known in advance to make things work out in the end. Do you find that you outline ahead of time, that you know who your characters are? Or do you lay out the motivations and characterizations that are relevant to the mystery structure in advance, and then let things unfold as they w

To a certain extent, you're right, things have to be known in advance. I don't usually start that way, though. A character and a situation occur to me, and I start writing. Once I get to a certain point, I usually have to stop and figure out how somebody was killed and why. And then I have to figure out how my detectives are going to discover all this (usually the hardest part). But, like you, although I may have decided that, for example, one character must have sister, when I come to write her, she may blossom into someone else entirely, someone who does things I had not foreseen. It's not usually that difficult to incorporate those changes into the plot, and I find it usually makes the plot better. Because until I write it, there's no depth to anything. It's just A killed B because he hated him, and the detective will discover this by finding out a, b, c, and then d.

So I do usually have an outline, but it's a loose one. Detective must find out that B has a knife, for example--but lots of times the way he finds out is quite different from what I had plotted out because the interactions of the characters as I go have made another route possible.

Cassandra