While I was working on the first Covenant trilogy, and for some time afterward, I had absolutely no intention of writing any more stories with the same character(s) and setting. I had-and have-no interest in repeating myself. But I had an editor at the time (Lester del Rey) who believed in fungible fiction: create something worthwhile and then repeat the same thing forever-or until it stops selling, whichever comes first. He refused to accept my complete disinterest, so he bombarded me with plots for the books he wanted next: plots which were all either trite or ludicrous or both. Eventually he sent me a suggestion so bad that I thought, "This is absurd. What I really ought to do is�." And before I could stop myself, I had come up with the ideas for both The Second Chronicles and The Last Chronicles.



At that point, I still didn't want to write more Covenant. But these news ideas were both impeccably logical (they grew organically out of the first trilogy) and impervious to the dangers of repeating myself (neither the characters nor the events covered old ground); and they quickly took on a life of their own. Soon I felt compelled to tackle them.



However, writing The Second Chronicles convinced me that I was simply not a good enough writer to do justice to The Last Chronicles; so I set the project aside while I tried to become a better writer (by the obvious expedient of pushing myself in new directions, writing other stories that had also acquired their own lives, and that required me to learn new skills in order to tell them). Well, I never did become a good enough writer. But after four mystery novels, two short story collections, the two volumes of Mordant's Need (fantasy), and the five volumes of the Gap sequence (science fiction), I realized that I was running out of life. Eventually The Last Chronicles became a now-or-never proposition, so I summoned up the courage to face my adequacies, and I got to work. Now only Book Four, The Last Dark, remains to be published.