All is lost, or so it certainly seems. Having made a desperate play to escape the Dæmon King, Jaral has lost the magical sword of his father, and worse, has been wounded with it in the process. He is now dying, slowing and painfully, and the Dæmon King as returned after a thousand years to finish his destructive plan for the world. Jaral’s only hope, he realizes, is to find his long lost father and learn what secrets he took with him to the underworld.
A treacherous journey lies ahead of Jaral as he traverses the land of the dead and looks into the very mouth of oblivion, but even greater challenges await his return. Can he even survive long enough to find the mysterious creature that promises to heal him? Can the world wait for him as the Dæmon King carries out his insideous plans—a world accustomed to steaming jungles now blanketed with snow, a dreadful plague and slowing claiming the lives of all living things, and finally an entire alien threat, as the very stars seem to be falling from the sky and laying waste to everything.
The story of Sickle Claw comes to a sweeping conclusion, with a murder trail for the “raptor man” Eralo, games of cloak and dagger as the princess attempts to reclaim her crown, Evran faces both knighthood and prospect of learning to fly on the massive pteranodons, a battle to win back with cauldron from the ogress Vilura, and the ultimate challenge of the Dæmon King and his legion of followers as several generations of heroes, of all different races, both living and dead, join to save the earth from its inevitable extinction.
In so many ways, this novel wrote itself, and yet it took my much longer than either of the preceeding books. I knew the ending of this one long before I ever started the first. I knew how it ended, as well as most of what led up to it. As far as figuring out the how and why, this particular book was easy.
My challenges here were more practical and personal in nature. First of all, there was a considerable setback regarding the manuscript itself. I had just finished writing the dice scene, which is just over the half-way point, I believe. I had been writing on a tablet, but keeping a backup of all my work on a desktop computer, as well as in the cloud (I won’t say whose cloud it was, but I will say I no longer use their cloud, or their search engine, for that matter). This started when I tried to access my cloud files from my desktop, only to realize that six months of work hadn’t been copied from my tablet. Even though my software showed that they were there, I discovered them sitting in a temporary folder on my tablet, waiting to be “synched”. So, I synched. But, instead of replacing all my old files in the cloud with my new files, it did the opposite, overwriting my newer files with the old. I didn’t panic, though, as I also had the files in their original directories, not to mention on my desktop. But alas, having previously uploaded files from those directories to this cloud service, the cloud service (nameless here forevermore) instead replaced all my files, everywhere. Three different locations these fileds had been moments before, and then gone.
I spent weeks searching and striving, sitting on customer service, trying to reconstruct fragmented cache files, but all for nothing. The files were completely gone. Six months of work, nearly have to book, were simply beyond my reach.
Needless to say, it took me more than six months to rewrite it. It took me nearly that long just to start rewriting. It is very difficult to go back and redo something that was already done, and done well. Especially if done well. It’s like putting on wet clothes. We’ve all done it. You’re out in the rain, soaked to the bone, freezing and shivering, and you finally make it under cover. You pull off—no—peel off the cloths, change into something warm and dry and curl up beside the fire, only to realize you have to go back out. Some else needs help. You forgot something. Whatever—the fact is, you have to go back into the icy rain, and you aren’t going to soak another set of clothes. So you take off your warm, dry clothes, and pull on the icy, wet, limp, cloying, horrid, nasty, evil wet clothes. That is exactly what it feels like to rewrite something you’ve already written.
But, I did. I still had my notes. It was still fresh in my mind, and I found every way that I could to make it interesting to me again. In that process, I probably made the entire book better. I hope I did, just so I can say it was all for the best.
In truth, that wasn’t the hardest thing about finishing this series. The hardest thing is my own condition. My health is not good. Let us just say it is an incurable auto-immune disease that isn’t hurting me enough for doctors to call it by its insideous name, but certainly hurts me enough to question whether I can continue writing and working as I have, even on the things I care most about, and even whether I still care about those things.
And when I say hurt, I do mean pain. I feel pain. Head pain. Joint pain. Tooth pain—God, I hate the tooth pain. Eye pain—and blood. I’ve now bled out of every oriface I have—yes, that one—and that one. All of them. But I suppose the worst is the pure exhaustion. The hardest thing I do every day is getting out of bed. Not just the physical challenge of getting up, but the decision to do it at all. Yet, somehow, I got this thing written.
And if you’ve read this book, or if you are going to read it, you’ll notice how much this is starting to sound like what I’ve written. The pain. The blood. The wondering how we can go on, if we can go on, whether we want to. It’s all in there. The frequent desire to curl up in some corner and never move again—that’s me talking.
But the really strange thing about it—that was all in the first draft, written long before I knew I had this disease. Was I experiencing it but not really admitting it to myself? Maybe. Was I somehow prophetic as I described Lara inflicted with a pain curse, Jaral bleeding from a wound he knew would never heal, Aravando limping about on a leg made of stone? I sometimes wonder. But I know this—there’s a lot more of me on these pages than I ever expected.
