Speaker for the Dead

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.
    “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.)
    Finally I knew I had to begin with the character of Novinha, who hadn't even existed in the original outline.   And the characters of Pipo and Libo had also emerged, along with Pipo's death, pretty much as they happen in the first few chapters of the book you now hold in your hands. But I still wasn't done. It still wasn't enough. I was about 200 pages deep and the book was dead in my hands and I didn't know what to do.
    It happened that a good friend of mine.   Gregg Keizer was working for Compute!   In fact I was the one who had recruited him away from his job as a junior high school English teacher (for which I think he has forgiven me) and brought him out to North Carolina. I had met Gregg when he became my student at a science fiction writing class I taught in the University of Utah's evening school program back in the seventies.   He was one of those frustrating students who are simply brilliant when they walk in the door, so the teacher can't take the slightest credit for anything they do.   He was also one of the most decent human beings I know, which makes me very nervous around him--so nervous, in fact that the only times I have ever gotten thoroughly and stupidly lost have been while he was in the car with me and I was supposed to know where I was going.   Some teacher!
    (I once was so certain that a story of Gregg's would sell that I made a wager with my class--if it didn't sell within one year, I would run naked through the corridors of Orson Spencer Hall on the U of U campus, which is where our class met. The story didn't sell in a year--a pox on editors!--and, perhaps out of an exaggerated commitment to aesthetics, I reneged on the bet. Since the story did sell a short while afterward, Gregg has never demanded that I make good, but he does have the debt hanging over my head.)
    Anyway, right during the time that I was stymied on Speaker, Gregg and I decided to go to New York for the 1985 Nebula weekend.   Ender's Game had only-just been published and neither of us had anything on the ballot. We just wanted to go to New York and to the Nebulas, so why