This has to be for Marg and Joe Brazil and their son, Nathan, who didn’t know about me until after they named him, but who prove that all those folks who said years ago that “Nathan Brazil” was such an implausible name.

Now we know that Nathan Brazil is a Canadian. That’s a fact. A Canadian fact.

Sorry Nathan’s not in the book, but…

Now, then, any Mavra Changs out there?

In 1976, I wrote a book called Midnight at the Well of Souls, (which Del Rey books published in mass market paperback.) The book seems to have struck a near universal chord; it has sold an incredible number of copies in North America and continues to do so; it was a Penguin book in the U.K. and Commonwealth, and it has since been sold to twenty-seven nations and has appeared in German, Hebrew, Italian, Russian—well, lots of languages.

Being poor and just starting out in the business, I was suddenly faced with my second novel being a kind of bestseller for the new line, and thus I was urged to do a sequel. I hadn’t really thought about it, but they were offering a lot of money for me at the time (about the equivalent of what I’m being paid for a small nation reprint these days, but I was poor then), and I had a vast canvas and I was also able to write and sell other books, including nonseries ones, so I proceeded, introducing Mavra Chang and creating what became a five book saga. Then I stopped, and did other things, and had no plans to return in spite of entreaties by readers and publisher alike to do so.

Then, ten years later, I got an offer I couldn’t refuse at a time when I was riding high, and I discovered that it was kind of fun to revisit after all that time. Thus the three volume Watchers at the Well set arrived, and was very well received, including by a lot of folks who never even suspected that prior books existed.