Musings of a Chicagoan

Worth a full repost, considering that chapters five and six came out, but chapter seven was supposedly due out in the beginning of February:

There is a fine author out there whose name is Diane Duane. She is a science-fiction author who has written some of the finest science fiction and fantasy that I have ever read, including some novels that depict Star Trek characters in the most fully fleshed-out light that I have ever seen them in. If I were forced to take only ten books with me onto a desert island, it is highly likely that Diane Duane would be the author of at least seven of them. Were I to be asked who my favorite authors were, I would be able to respond without a moment’s thought that they were Diane Duane and Neil Gaiman.

It is this deep respect I have for her that makes this situation so damn odd, as I find myself concerned and extremely frustrated with the manner in which she is handling a situation involving me and a large number of her other readers, a project for which she received considerable Internet coverage in the beginning of 2006.

On December 13, 2005, Ms. Duane broached the subject of asking whether her fans would fund a sequel to her Feline Wizardry novels The Book of Night With Moon and To Visit the Queen. In late February 2006, the project started. Boing Boing covered her initial musings and when the project went underway, and in a move that any dual Duane-Gaiman fan would squee with delight over, Neil also covered her initial musings and when the project started.

Chapter one was released in March; chapter two in early April; and chapter three in late April. Chapter four was released in early June, the delay due to work projects and technical glitches. In a timetable released on August 3, Ms. Duane indicated that delays had occurred due to a peculiar summer, and that chapter five would be released August 15 — her revised timetable at this time had the novel finished by Thanksgiving. On August 28, Ms. Duane indicated that the chapter would be released on August 31; her mother-in-law fell ill.

Ms. Duane’s weblog has not gone silent — in fact, she recently wrote two rather lengthy (and, do not get me wrong, fascinating) posts on “Where No One Has Gone Before,” a first season episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation which Ms. Duane co-authored, in response to a humorous review by Wil Wheaton (who, if you’ve been living in a cave since 1987, portrayed Wesley Crusher, one of the series’ characters).

Now, don’t get me wrong — given that the teleplay was based in no small part on my favorite of Ms. Duane’s Trek novels, The Wounded Sky, I definitely enjoyed reading her take on the process.

But what frustrates me is this: I know Ms. Duane has been asked about the status of The Big Meow — because I was one of the ones who did the asking. I don’t have access to her e-mail; I don’t know how many other contributors are wondering the same thing I am. But I see that she is constantly writing in her weblog — something I am glad for, do not get me wrong. After seeing this, I wrote a very polite e-mail to her asking her if she might update her contributors as to the status of the project. She never responded.

Readers contributed varying amounts of money to the success of this project — and the amounts, due to it being a self-published project, were larger than one might pay in the bookshop ($24 for paperback, $35 for hardcover, if memory serves). Some very generous readers even funded challenge grants in varyingly large amounts — $400, even $1,000.

Ms. Duane’s readers, at her request, have given to her their own money to fund her work on The Big Meow, because they believe in her and would greatly enjoy reading the third book in this series. Because of this, they are not only her readers, they are her customers and investors — and can without too much hyperbole also be termed some of her more devoted fans.

I think that advising those fans who believe in her strongly enough to invest their own money — whether in large amounts (such as the challenge grants) or merely in amounts larger than that they’d normally pay for a novel (in my case, the book fee itself, a $10 upgrade to hardcover, and an extra $10 towards the project — about a $40ish investment) — of the status of the project, and of the expected future of the project — even in the most vaguest of generalities — is not too much to ask.

While Ms. Duane has not lost my readership — I look forward to The Empty Chair’s release later this year — she has introduced a note of caution in my mind that I would have never thought would have been necessary. And while she has not lost one iota of the respect I have for her literary acumen or fantastic imagination, I find I cannot respect the manner in which communication regarding these delays has been handled.

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