A word from Geary Gravel

[Marzhin]

Geary Gravel, the author who wrote two Might and Magic novels in the mid-nineties, kindly accepted to share his memories of how he came to work on this project, and the cancellation of the third part of the planned trilogy, "The Worldcrafters".

"I was approached a little over ten years ago by a packager who had made an arrangement with a publisher (Del Rey) and a gaming company (New World Computing) to come up with three novels to be based on the Might & Magic games. (I believe the original plan was for a copy of the first book to be included in each new game, though this did not end up happening.) I had never played the games, but was assured I'd be provided with lots of background material from the one they were currently working on, M&M VI. I accepted the assignment and flew out to California, where I met briefly with the people working on the game. The meeting went well, though they were still at the very beginning of design work on the game. Some months went by. Progress on M&M VI went very slowly without yielding substantial info for me to base my story on, and eventually I was told to go ahead and do the writing, and that the game would then be based upon the material in my story, instead of vice versa. I produced The Dreamwright and The Shadowsmith and Del Rey published them both.


When M&M VI did appear, I found that they had developed it pretty much independently of the material in the novels. This made me wonder about the whole exercise, as it guaranteed that there would be few if any connectionsbetween game and supposed novelizations. Eventually I heard from the packager that he had decided to end the series with Book Two. He asked me to fulfill the three book deal by beginning work on an entirely new and unrelated novel. At this point I was already several chapters into Book Three, The Worldcrafters, in which I had planned to detail Hitch and Diligence's long journey back home from the rescue of Pomponderant they had embarked on at the end of Book Two--and incidentally reveal how the ancients had first come to this world, explain the role of the yeofolk and the underground ruins, etc., etc. Since I had already done considerable work developing the universe of the Dreamwright and had progressed several chapters into the next book, I declined to switch gears and tackle a whole new universe, and with the help of my agent was released from the contract.

As you can imagine, I had grown quite fond of my characters and their world and was disappointed at not being able to finish the story begun in the first book. On the other hand, I enjoyed writing the two books, and didn't regret the time I had spent creating and exploring that universe."

From "The Dreamwright" : "Geary Gravel effortlessly balances his twin careers of writing and sign-language interpreting. Prolific and punctual to a fault, he has never missed a book deadline, nor taken exception to an editor's request for changes to a manuscript. The Dreamwright is an example of his fiction at its imaginative best."

If you would like to take a look at the original page visit this link:
https://www.celestialheavens.com/1157732639

[Darkion]

So that's what happened! I really enjoyed the first two books and often wondered how I could have neglected buying the third one.