"Fine. We'll send a contract to Barbara as soon as I get back to New York."

Lo! It happened exactly as he said! This was something I had never seen before--a publisher making a decision instantly and then having everything he said turn out to be true! I still marvel at it--a publisher who is not only an honest man but also loves (and reads) books, makes decisions quickly, and then can sell the books he publishes!

Gratefully I set aside Speaker and began plotting Ender's Game. By the time I quit my job at Compute! that fall, after only nine months in the position (I'm not cut out for corporate life anymore, I'm afraid), I was raring to go. I began Ender's Game before Christmas that year, took a break to go to Utah to promote my novel Saints, and then returned home and finished the book in a couple more weeks.

Then I turned to Speaker and the real suffering began. By now, of course, the title had changed from Speaker of Death to Speaker for the Dead, as the concept had clarified at the end of Ender's Game. By now, the character of Ender had developed so much that my original draft of the opening of Speaker was almost laughable. I had begun (except for the "introductory chapter") with Ender's arrival on the planet Lusitania. Just in time to speak the death of an old lout named Marcão. But it was hollow and empty and it just wasn't working. So I went back to the drawing board and began all over again.

I began the book several more times, each time getting a little farther, but each time being blocked because it still wasn't right. I didn't know what "right" was, of course--but I did have several hundred pages of "wrong." (During this struggle with Speaker I wrote the novel Wyrms, which in some ways was a tryout of the scientific ideas in Speaker and, eventually, Xenocide—using a semisentient molecule that adapts itself easily to alien species in order to take them over and control them.)