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email Kate Elliott
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I got the news of my first professional sale the same month I found out I was pregnant. For me, books and babies are inextricably intertwined. I can’t imagine one without the other, or vice versa. Years and years ago, back in the dark ages, those few women who did write (or who wished for a career in any field) were usually told that they had to choose between books and babies (or a career and a family). Luckily, that’s no longer the case. 

Would my life be easier if I had chosen to have children and either not write or put off writing until my children were grown, or if I had chosen not to have children and devote my life to writing? Certainly. 

But I refused to make that "either-or" choice, nor would I accept the idea that I could only do one or the other. It’s hard to know if I would have been a better parent if I hadn’t also been a writer, although I know that at times when the frustration or, more commonly, the boredom of raising small children overwhelmed me, writing was my sanity.

I do know that being a parent has made me a better writer. 

Let me hastily note that, to paraphrase Ursula Le Guin in her wonderful essay about motherhood and writing, "The Fisherwoman’s Daughter," [published as part of the collection DANCING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD] I don’t think mothers ought to write (unless they want to) or that writers ought to have children (unless they want to). 
 

Each person needs to find that path in life that will work for her, if she’s lucky enough to have a choice. I try never to forget that many people have no such choice about which road they’re going to take, and over the course of my career I’ve attempted to write about the varying degrees of freedom people have and how they adapt, conform, or rebel. 

A quick bibliography will suffice to summarize my work in the last twelve years: 

I wrote THE LABYRINTH GATE in 1987, and it was published in December 1988. During 1988 I revised A PASSAGE OF STARS and wrote REVOLUTION’S SHORE. I wrote THE PRICE OF RANSOM in 1989, finishing about three quarters of it while I was pregnant with twins and finishing it after their birth. As I sometimes quip, the book was due in August and the babies in October, but the babies arrived in August and the book was finished in October. These three books, comprising the HIGHROAD trilogy, were published in February, July, and October 1990.

In the fall of 1990 I did a major rewrite of JARAN--this counted as the seventh revision. DAW Books bought JARAN in the spring of 1991, after which I did a final revision. 

I then tackled the book whose working title was THE BARBARIAN YEAR, which was published as the two-part THE SWORD OF HEAVEN (Part one: An Earthly Crown & Part two: His Conquering Sword). This is the longest single work I’ve written so far: the first draft amounted to about 1400 pages, which were subsequently split into two volumes even though it is a single novel. Because I had been making notes on this novel for ten years before I wrote it, it wrote very quickly indeed. I call it my "Mozart" novel because of the speed it flowed out of me: 1400 pages in 9 months. Of course, I subsequently did revisions (as I always do), but overall THE SWORD OF HEAVEN is probably the "cleanest" book I’ve ever written. Its two parts were published in March and June 1993. 

Not surprisingly, I followed my "Mozart" novel with my "Beethoven" novel. Writing THE LAW OF BECOMING (another title change, this time from HIS OTHER SON) was like hacking through the jungle into unknown country. It was both a challenge and a pleasure to write, precisely because it was such a difficult work to get on the page. It did take me longer than any previous work to write, and because of that THE LAW OF BECOMING didn’t come out until October 1994. 

At this point I set my sights on two new projects: a major collaboration with fantasy authors Melanie Rawn and Jennifer Robersen, and a fantasy series. I’ve written elsewhere that I needed a break from the Jaran series so that it wouldn’t go stale. I have to admit that I didn’t expect the break to last quite this long; I still have more novels to write in the universe of the Jaran. 

I’ve written elsewhere about the collaboration with Melanie and Jennifer. THE GOLDEN KEY was published in the USA by DAW Books in the fall of 1996, by Pan/Macmillan in the spring of 1997, and by Goldmann, in a German translation taking up three volumes, in 1997-98. There may be other foreign editions out there, but I haven’t seen them yet. 

As soon as THE GOLDEN KEY was turned in, I got back to work on KING’S DRAGON, the first of the Crown of Stars fantasy series. I had written a portion of this novel some years previously, and now I did extensive revisions and then finished it. After that, I wrote PRINCE OF DOGS. The most interesting aspect of writing PRINCE OF DOGS for me happened when I got about two thirds of the way through the first draft and suddenly realized that I had never dealt with the fall out from the Eika takeover of the city of Gent. I went back to the beginning and added the story of Anna, the refugee girl, to echo the story of Sanglant’s rescue. 

THE BURNING STONE proved a difficult book to write because during its composition my family spent six months in a small town in Mexico while my husband did field work. Because of its length and because of the complications involved in living in a foreign country, it took me longer to finish than I had hoped or expected. For that reason, it didn’t come out one year after PRINCE OF DOGS but rather 14 months later. 

That pretty much brings me up to date. Looking back, the most unexpected aspect of writing professionally has been that it never does get any easier. I had an idea, when I was an aspiring writer dreaming of getting my first novel published, that once I worked full time writing it would flow like a river, easy and fresh. Little did I know that in fact writing professionally is more like the trip of the African Queen, in the Bogart/Hepburn movie of the same name: much harder work than I ever thought it would be. 

In other words, it’s time to get back to dragging the boat up the river. That mirage, “the perfect novel,” keeps receding into the distance before me, and I keep pursuing it, knowing that it is a mirage and that in the end I just have to do the best I can with each novel. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to work. 

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