Sandworms of Dune
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Thursday, March 29, 2007

Juggling Plots

I'm sitting at Brian Herbert's breakfast table right now, sipping my morning coffee and looking out at Puget Sound. A sunny day in Seattle (imagine that!). I get up earlier than Brian, so I have a chance to check e-mail, go through all the MySpace postings and correspondence, and write this quick blog before we begin our day's work.

Brian and I are together for the next six days to do all the major sketching out of the plotlines and developments for PAUL OF DUNE, IRULAN OF DUNE, and JESSICA OF DUNE, and hammer out the detailed chapter-by-chapter outline for PAUL. We've been pondering this trilogy on the back burner for years (my earliest notes and correspondence with Brian about it date back to 2000), and we've been exchanging more and more detailed letters for the past several months. Now it's time to put all the pieces together.

While I'm up here, Tor Books is arranging for a film crew to come in and record an interview for Expanded Books, which will be distributed widely on DVD and I'll also try to make it available here on the website.

Just catching up with things here. My sinus surgery last week slowed me down some. I received the final round of comments from the editors on LAST DAYS OF KRYPTON, and I'll need to do about a week of tweaking to pump up a few scenes. Rebecca and I are finishing up our outline for the third CRYSTAL DOORS novel, our young-adult fantasy trilogy, and we'll be writing that short book over the next month. Brian has finished the first draft of his final TIMEWEB novel. And I'm more than half done with writing Seven Suns #7.

All of which sounds like quite a flurry, but this is really the last stage of clearing the decks. My writing schedule this year is much more open than in previous years, and Brian and I will be able to devote full attention to PAUL.

As soon as I catch my breath a little more, I'll catch up here on the duenovels blog, too. I will be posting sample chapters of SANDWORMS soon, and I may even be able to convince Brian to write an occasional entry.

Again, thanks for the flood of kind letters and your support for the Dune universe, whether you like only the original novels, or our new novels, or one film version or the other, or the whole spectrum.

-- KJA