And the last note in Fall comes from Jennifer Fallon, who explains the unlikely way that her quite nifty fantasy novel Warrior, and the entire trilogy that it’s part of, came to be:

Wolfblade, Warrior and Warlord exist because we’d already sold “Second Sons” to Random House when the Tor offer came in for what was then known as the “Demon Child Trilogy.” They wanted to know if there was anything else on offer, and my agent suggested I “bash up a synopsis for a sequel.”

As I only had an afternoon in which to do this, and couldn’t think of anything that sounded even remotely sane on such short notice, I shamelessly raided the back story of the Wolfblade family and offered it up as prequel, with my agent assuring me nothing more would come of it.

When the offer came in from Tor, it was for the six book series, now known as the “Hythrun Chronicles.” It made my head hurt, writing a prequel I never intended to write to make it fit the other series. For almost a year on my whiteboard there was a note entitled “These People Must Die,” which was a list of characters I had to get rid of by the end of book 3 to explain why they never turned up in the “Demon Child Trilogy.”