"Books - David Eddings - Rivan Codex, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

There's a point buried in most of them. The point to this one is the
importance of the sound of names in High Fantasy. Would Launcelot
impress you very much if his name were 'Charlie' or 'Wilbur'? The bride
of my youth spends hours concocting names. It was ~ and still is - her
specialty. (She's also very good at deleting junk and coming up with
great endings.) I can manufacture names if I have to, but hers are
better. Incidentally, that.'Gar' at the center of "Belgarath', "Polgara., and
'Garion' derives from proto-Indo European. Linguists have been amusing
themselves for years backtracking their way to the original language
spoken by the barbarians who came wandering off the steppes of
Central Asia twelve thousand or so years ago. 'Gar' meant 'Spear' back
in those days. isn't that interesting?

When the preliminary studies were finished, my collaborator and I
hammered together an outline, reviewed our character sketches,
and we got started. When we had a first draft of what we thought was
going to be Book I completed, I sent a proposal., complete with the
overall outline, to Ballantine Books, and, naturally, the Post Office
Department lost it. After six months, I sent a snippy note to Ballantine.
'At least you could have had the decency to say no.They replied, 'Gee,
we never got your proposal.'I had almost dumped the

whole idea of the series because of the gross negligence of my
government. I sent the proposal off again. Lester liked it, and we signed
a contract. Now we were getting paid for this, so we started to
concentrate.

Incidentally, my original proposal envisioned a trilogy - three books
tentatively titled Garion, CeNedra, and Kal Torak. That notion tumbled
down around my ears when Lester explained the realities of the
American publishing business to me. B. Dalton and Waldenbooks had
limits on genre fiction, and those two chains ruled the world. At that
time, they wanted genre fiction to be paperbacks

priced at under three dollars, and thus no more than 300 pages.

'This is what we're going to do,' Lester told me. (Notice that 'we'. He
didn't really mean'we'; he meant me.) 'We're going to break it up into
five books instead of three.'My original game plan went out the
window. I choked and went on. The chess-piece titles, incidentally,

were Lester's idea. I didn't like that one very much either. I wanted to
call Book V In the Tomb of the One Eyed God. I thought that had a nice
ring to it but Lester patiently explained that a title that long wouldn't
leave any room for a cover illustration. I was losing a lot of

arguments here. Lester favored the bulldozer approach to his writers,
though, so he ran over me fairly often.

I did win one, though - I think. Lester had told me that 'Fantasy