Speaker for the Dead

the persona they had developed in order to deal with their dead father, and then show, clearly, how they all changed because of Ender's influence on their lives.
    Much of that, however, would have to come with the actual writing of the new draft of the novel.   My immediate task was to differentiate clearly between Novinha's children when the reader first encounters them. I sat there in the room I shared with Gregg, assigning some immediate and obvious trait to each of the children that would help the reader keep track of them.   Oh, yes, Olhado is the one with the metal eyes; Quara is the one who says outrageous things after long silences; Grego is the violent one; Quim is the religious fanatic; Ela is the weary mother-figure; Miro is the eldest son, the hero in the others' eyes.   These "hooks" could only serve to introduce the children--I'd have to develop them far beyond that point--but having found those hooks, I had a plan that would let me proceed with confidence.
    My novel had, at last, opened up to me, and I came home from that Nebula weekend and wrote the whole novel, from beginning to end, in a month.   As I tell my writing students, once you get the beginning right, the ending almost writes itself.
    One more thing, though.   No matter how well-planned a novel is--and, in my case at least, it must be very well-planned before i can write it--there are still things that come up during the process of writing that you simply didn't plan on.   In my Alvin Maker novels, for instance, the characters of Little Peggy and Arthur Stuart weren't in any of my outlines, and yet they are now at the heart of that story.   And in Speaker for the Dead, the character of Jane wasn't in any of the outlines I made.   Oh, yes, I gave him a computer connection through the jewel in his ear, but I didn't know it was a person. Jane just grew because it was so fun to write her relationship with Ender.   She helped bring him to life (he could so easily have been a stodgy, dull adult), and in the process came to life herself.   By the time I was done with Speaker for the Dead, Jane was one of the most important characters in it, and much of the third book, Xenocide , centers around her.
    Oh yes.   The third book. I had never planned to write a third book.   In fact, I really hadn't planned to write a first book-- Speaker was originally supposed to be a solo .   But just as I was writing the last few chapters of Speaker, Barbara Bova called and said she had sold the Ender trilogy to an English publisher.
    "The Ender trilogy ," I asked.   "Barbara, there are only two."
    Naturally, she was a bit flummoxed.   Of course she could always go back and renegotiate for only two books.   But first, couldn't I think a little bit and see if perhaps I might come up with a third story that I wanted to write?
    At that moment I knew exactly the story I wanted to tell.   It had nothing to do with Ender Wiggin or any of the characters in Speaker for the Dead.   Rather it was an ancient project from early in my career, one that Jim Frenkel, then at Dell, had rejected because I just wasn't   mature enough, as a writer, to handle a project so difficult.   Having solved the problems of Speaker for the Dead, though, I felt ready to tackle anything.   It had been years since I had even thought about that story, then called Philotes, yet wasn't it possible that by putting Ender Wiggin into it, I might be able to bring it to life the way Speaker had come to life because of his presence? I might fail, of course, but why not try?
    Besides--and here you are about to learn something truly vile about me--having a third book would mean that I didn't have to figure out some way to resolve the two loose threads that I knew would be dangling at the end of Speaker.   What happens to the hive queen?   And what happens to the fleet that Starways Congress sends?
    By agreeing to do a third Ender book I could leave those questions for the sequel, and since I am a shamefully lazy man, I jumped at the chance. I jumped too soon--the book was every bit as difficult as Jim Frenkel had told me it would be, and it took years to get it right--and even then it is far and away the talkiest, most philosophical of my novels, which is just what the original outline of Philotes had required.   Over the years the title of the third book changed, from Ender's Children to Xenocide, and it also grew until it became two books, so that even Xenocide doesn't finish the