With the earlier books now complete—those more modest efforts, with their tight casts and self-contained arcs, stories that were called "children's books" only because no other genre existed for them—Rose turned her attention to the true labor ahead. This next project was already mythic in her own imagination, an undertaking that required nothing short of total intellectual and emotional commitment. It would be a tapestry stretched across decades and continents, generations of tangled bloodlines, wars and betrayals and brief, illusory moments of peace; every proper noun needed to sound as if it had been spoken by ancient tongues; every familial connection, however obscure, must ripple with consequences that would not be felt for chapters, for whole volumes, perhaps not until the final page.
She obsessed over genealogies, drew intricate trees and diagrams on napkins at midnight, constructed entire histories for characters who might only utter a single line. The world she envisioned was, in its way, more real than the one she inhabited. There would be dragons, yes, and magic, yes, but these would be afterthoughts, set dressing for the real spectacle: human beings grappling for power, terrified of mortality, driven by the same hungers and shames and ideals that had haunted every civilization since the beginning.
If she succeeded, she believed, it would be the kind of book that rewrote expectations—not only of epic fantasy, but of what stories could do at all. The first book would be called A Game of Thrones, writing about the Starks, Lannisters, Boltons, Targaryens, and Baratheons. She tested the names on her tongue as she walked around the house, whispered them to herself at the stove, scrawled them in the margins of her grocery lists. Each had to ring true, had to evoke a dynasty, a wound, a destiny.
She knew it would take years. But she'd already begun the other stories and musicals in the series, sending drafts to her editors in Chicago or Los Angeles, always careful to keep the tone appropriate for the relevant communities—one set for the theater people, another for the children's book crowd, another for the weirdos who haunted the science fiction conventions where she sometimes guested as a ringer. She compartmentalized ruthlessly, always keeping the epic fantasy under wraps, a secret ember fueling her late nights.
Her competitive streak, which she'd inherited from her mother in barely-diluted form, made her study the launches of every major fantasy release. She charted the rise and fall of trilogies, noted the differences in cover art and blurbs, obsessed over the messaging and the rollout. The Tolkien estate kept everything cloaked in an air of somber English nobility; the Dune books came out in waves, their covers ever more baroque, their spinoffs multiplying until the premise collapsed under its own gravity. Rose watched and learned, filing every observation for the day when her own creation would be ready to breach the surface.
She worked out a preliminary marketing campaign as she revised the first hundred pages. The trick would be to cloak the book in just enough seriousness to capture those readers who had grown up on Tolkien but now wanted something more adult, more ambiguous, more willing to confront the messiness and violence of real life. She imagined the blurbs: "For those who wished Lord of the Rings had more sex and murder." She'd have to use her connections at the New Yorker, maybe get a pre-review that lent the project a whiff of literary respectability. But she also wanted to cultivate a sense of danger, a promise that this was not the sort of fantasy where good would automatically triumph over evil, where the boundaries of morality were not already mapped and policed.
In truth, she was also terrified. If the book failed, it would fail so publicly, so definitively, that her other work would be relegated to the dustbin of minor genre history. She would not be the next Tolkien or Martin or even LeGuin—just another ambitious striver who crashed against the shoals of the market. But the prospect of that humiliation also spurred her on. She told herself every morning that it didn't matter if she succeeded or failed, only that the work was worthy of the attempt.
She ran each chapter past her agent before showing it to anyone else, knowing Richard would be blunt if the material sagged or lost its way. He told her, "The more savage and unpredictable, the better. Don't get too attached to the characters—kill the darlings and see what happens." She took this advice to heart, disposing of protagonists with increasing relish, letting the story spiral into ever darker territory. It was, in some ways, like raising children: you could only do so much to protect them before the world intervened.
As she finished the third major revision, Rose began mapping out her approach to the publishers. There would be no talk of children's literature anywhere in the query letter. She would target the imprints that specialized in "literary fantasy," the ones who prided themselves on finding the next big crossover hit. If those failed, she would pivot to the international market, maybe even self-publish the thing and sell it at conventions under a pseudonym. The only non-negotiable was that the work be presented as uncompromising, dangerous, and true.
She burned through another legal pad of notes, tracking potential blurbers and launch events, making a list of every disgraced academic or failed novelist who might write a thinkpiece about the book's moral ambiguity. She even plotted out a series of fake negative reviews to seed in the early days, reasoning that the best way to stoke controversy was to have a few noisy enemies.
If she was going to go all in, she told herself, there was no sense in half-measures. She would pitch the book like the end of the world depended on it, because in a way, her own private world did.
She started with a plan to target the hungriest agents—the ones who weren't already tied up with established genre kingpins—then the handful of publishers who had recently made a splash with "edgier" fantasy debuts.