Anyway, despite eventually writing about a hundred pages of outline, there were a lot of things I didn't know when I started Dragonbone , and I just had to trust I would find out along the way. At first he was only going to be in the two scenes with Simon, one at the Hayholt market and the other at the inn. The problem with that kind of approach, of course, is that the first two volumes were already going to be in print by the time I was finishing the third, so if I did something wrong, or changed something after the fact, it was too late to go back and alter it, as you could do before printing a standalone novel. I left some things open-ended in the first two volumes, so I could enforce a different interpretation once the book was in print, if necessary. I never had any idea the books would be as long and complex as they turned out to be.
Every book has a life of it's own to the writer.
The mental image I have for Dragonbone is of a guy setting out for an afternoon's hike carrying only his lunch, and then being stuck in the mountains for weeks, wishing he'd brought more with him than just a carton of yogurt and a sweater. That guy was me. If you'd told me when I started writing the first paragraph of The Dragonbone Chair that I wouldn't finish the story for eight years, I'd have thought you were absolutely barking mad.