What I discovered then--the spring of 1983--was that the book was unwritable. In order to make the Ender Wiggin of Speaker make any kind of sense, I had to have this really long, kind of boring opening chapter that brought him from the end of the Bugger War to the beginning of the story of Speaker some three thousand years later! It was outrageous. I couldn't write it.

When Compute!, the publisher I was working for as a book editor, sent me along to the American Booksellers Association convention in Dallas, I noticed that Tom Doherty himself was at the Tor Books exhibit. I greeted him, and then on impulse asked him if I could talk to him. I had no well-formed plan in mind, and I was a little frightened when he said, "Sure," and set an appointment not long after. Our meeting consisted of walking through the crowds as I explained to him the problem I was having writing Speaker. The only solution I could think of, I said, was to write a novel version of Ender's Game, so I could put all that material about how Ender became a Speaker for the Dead at the end of that book, thus allowing Speaker to begin at its true beginning.

Once I proposed the idea (having only thought of it a short while before) it seemed so obvious that I wondered why I hadn't tried to sell a novel version of Ender's Game years before. (Only later did I realise that it wasn't until I was working on Speaker that the character of Ender Wiggin grew enough to be able to sustain a novel.) Still, Tom agreed with me that a novel version of Ender's Game was a good idea. "Let's do it" he said. "Same terms as Speaker?".

"Sure," I said, hardly believing that the decision could be made so easily--I hadn't talked to him more than five minutes.