We’ve done it, team—Dead Hand Rule hits shelves in one month and two days, and we have reached the end of our Craft story-so-far discussion group. I have been living in this strange, familiar subcreation for over ten years, surprised by its oddities and inventions, exploring what it is I’ve done here, as I give my time and self to this odd ritual of words and blank space. Re-reading these books, I have watched myself grow as a writer and a person, and watched these characters grow too. And, re-reading with others, I’ve felt the wonder and joy of good company on this journey. Some of you have been along since the very beginning, and some of you only showed up recently—welcome, either way, and thank you. And please join me in sending waves of gratitude to Hannah at thehiddenschools.com and to the mods of r/CraftSequence for their joint hospitality.

Here are a few selections from yesterday’s AMA; this time in particular you may want to click through and read the rest of the thread. There were many great questions. One in particular required some spoiler-tagging, a feature I don’t know how to implement in email. But here are some highlights.

Specialist_Half_5687 writes:

“Hello Max, and thanks again for doing all these AMAs. Here’s my questions.

1. When the Craft Wars was first announced, I imagined the books would all be like what we eventually got in Wicked Problems. Epic books where several characters and plot threads from the series got brought together. Dead Country, while still well written, was definitely not that. What made you start the Craft Wars with a smaller scale story focusing only on Tara, with a surprisingly short page count?

2. With Three Parts Dead, Dead Country, and now Dead Hand Rule, are you worried you might be using the word Dead in too many of the titles in this series?

3. How did you intend Alt Coulumb to be pronounced?

4. I know the Craft Wars is the conclusion of all the bigger plot arcs set up in the Sequence, but is there still a possibility of more Craft books in the future? I’d love a short story collection. Of course, more non Craft books by you would still be great as well.”

My pleasure! I loved these books enough to write them, & it’s wonderful to share that with folks.

1. The Craft Wars story is so big, so sprawling, and involves so many different pieces of a world established (or even just hinted at) in other books, that I wanted to build a clear narrative spine. If you’ve seen the anime Baccano! (and if not, you really should! it’s one of my favorites), the opening episode is a philosophical rumination about the challenge of finding a beginning for a complex multithreaded story whose true starting point takes place hundreds of years before the main dramatic action. The opening of Stephen King’s It is another good take on the problem. I wanted one book for Dawn and Tara, sketching out the big problem in a small space: the new world struggling to be born and the beleaguered mid-career millennials trying to keep everything from falling apart. I also wanted a book that could also serve as a “story so far” on the big ideas and conflicts of the world. If I’d kicked off with something like Wicked Problems, I think it would have been hard for Dawn to come into her own as a character.

2. My rule is, no two books with Dead published side by side. Three Dead’s is maybe too many, but it’s thematic, and I couldn’t get away with writing a legal fantasy series without a Rule Against Perpetuities joke. As long as I don’t call book 4 Dead Reckoning or Don’t Dead Open Inside or something, I think I’m safe.

3. Most of the time in my head it’s (uhlt COO-lum) but I’m not from there.

4. Never say never! As I mentioned in, maybe the Ruin of Angels AMA, there are at least two “missing” books that might be fun to write someday, and I love the idea of a short story collection. But I want to finish the main arc of the series with the Craft Wars, at least for now.

u/thehiddenschools asks: “Is there anything foreshadowed/hinted at that people (...me) seem to have totally missed that will play a part in the next 2 books?”

I’ve gone to some effort to avoid running into too much speculation--I love that it’s out there! But reading it seems to be all pitfall, as a practitioner. If the speculation’s right (and hopeful), many folks will feel a natural horror of being anticipated and veer the story away from the speculation--I think this is an immature instinct, since if you’ve done your work right, some people will see where the lines converge! But it’s still an instinct. If the speculation’s right but discouraging--”I hope they don’t do X”--then you might feel an urge to course-correct... but that opinion is just one person’s, and it doesn’t take into account execution, which so often makes the difference in this sort of thing. If the speculation’s off-base, it can pose other pitfalls: “well, what if I did do it that way?” or “oh, that would be so cool (but contradict a whole bunch of other stuff about the story...)” So I don’t know what people have anticipated, yet. There are a few subtle setups that I’m really looking forward to paying off, though!

BravoLimaPoppa asks: “I’ve got at least one: Did the character interactions surprise you? Mal and Temoc surprised me. Cal and Abelard was not what I expected.

Heck, did any of the characters arcs and interactions change as you went?”

Character interactions are so often a surprise. It’s hard to know quite how a character’s going to roll until I’m inside their head in a particular story beat--that’s what complicates my outlines more than anything else it seems. Mal and Temoc’s a great one--actually most of Mal’s character in the Craft Wars was a surprise. I’d dreamed up many different versions of her in the Craft Wars, most in some kind of antagonistic-to-Caleb role, and it was a really pleasant surprise to meet her in a better (for certain values of better, it is Mal after all) place. Sometimes your characters run off and heal on you when you’re not looking! One of the core character arcs in Dead Hand Rule was a bit of a surprise; in Wicked Problems I discovered that two characters had a lot to say to one another but I didn’t quite realize how much. But I can’t say more without spoilers!

To expand on that a bit, I very rarely think “something about this character surprised me, let me go back and revise them so they’re more in line with the plan.” Those surprises often feel like something smarter or wiser than me has taken the wheel, even if we’re now on a road that leads in a direction orthogonal to my intent.

“Are we supposted to think about Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Dawn? Obviously it’s not the same character at all, but was that a conscious Easter Egg?”

I wish it were a conscious Easter Egg, because it feels like the kind of parallel a writer could have worked with to good effect! To be honest I’ve only ever seen Buffy S1, so most of what I know about the Buffy character I’ve learned from osmosis. She has some of that younger-sister energy, though.

“At what point in writing did you realise that the end section needed to be its own book? Was it easy to get the publishing team on board with a 4th book?”

I suspected it about halfway into the part of the book that became Dead Hand Rule. I found myself shouldering up against the limits of the form -- it felt weird introducing so many new characters and situations in the back half of a book. I guess it works in Little, Big, or in Anathem, but... well, the DHR material felt so much like its own book, with its own shape, dramatic arc, unities of scene and character and so on. And I kept thinking of things I would have loved to do if I’d had the narrative space. It wasn’t until I typed the whole manuscript up (I wrote both books longhand thinking they’d be a single book) and found myself with something like 280,000 words that I realized, with some relief, how much more sense it made to divide them. The length of the manuscript made the conversation with the team at Tor quite easy. Easier than the revision job, anyway!

You can read the rest of the Q&A on the subreddit! Take care of one another, friends. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings. See you soon!