I am just starting my third day of the KRYPTON tour, waiting for my ride to the Salt Lake City airport on my way to Reno, Nevada, for a library conference. So far, I've signed at nine stores in the Denver area and four in the Salt Lake City/Provo area. (Generally, the bookstores have had as many copies of SANDWORMS OF DUNE as they have of KRYPTON, so the book is still quite popular.) Some stores have also received their copies of the new release of all the "Seven Suns" books featuring the new cover design.

Brian has sent me the file for Draft 2 of PAUL OF DUNE, which currently runs 188,000 words long. After much discussion, we have decide to tighten up the "young Paul" sections of the novel and concentrate more on the Emperor Muad'Dib storyline. We hope to get the book down to a more manageable 150,000 words (about the length of CHILDREN OF DUNE).

With THE LAST DAYS OF KRYPTON I'm getting quite a few questions asking which continuity does the novel fit into. Now that's always a tricky question (and let's not even talk about defining "canon," especially in something as tangled as the DC Universe). Since the creation of the character, Supeman has existed in a lot of different versions. SMALLVILLE, for instance, has a very different version of Jor-El from the Marlon Brando depiction in the Christopher Reeve movies, which is also quite different from the varied portrayals of Superman's father in the comics. The character of Brainiac, especially, has been through numerous incarnations in the comics, and James Masters gave us a new one yet in SMALLVILLE.

No single novel could take all these independent continuities and fuse them into a comprehensible plot, without playing an impossible game of literary Twister. Fortunately, DC encouraged me to take the best parts of the Superman mythos and develop the best story in a fresh continuity that all fans can enjoy -- Jor-El's discovery of the Phantom Zone, his romance with Lara, his brother Zor-El and the marvelous Argo City, the rise of General Zod, Brainiac stealing the city of Kandor, and so on, including plenty of treats for the die-hard fans as well.

-- KJA