One for the diehard Fabled Lands players this week, as I came across the original titles that Jamie and I were considering for the later books in the series. We must have drawn up this list right after writing FL books 1 and 2. The books up for discussion, clockwise from top left, later became known as Over the Blood-Dark Sea (book 3), The Serpent King's Domain (book 7), The Plains of Howling Darkness (book 4) and The Legions of the Labyrinth (book 10, still unpublished).
I've already recounted our struggles to get the publisher to accept Devils & Howling Darkness as the title of book 4, but WH Smith's were worried that any mention of devils might scandalize fundamentalist religious groups. Jamie and I didn't think they'd buy the FL books anyway, but we argued the point in vain.
The notes refer to our editor, Ian Marsh, who also helmed the Virtual Reality gamebook series. I believe he also digitally typeset the books, though I don't suppose the publishers paid him anything extra for doing that.
My biggest regret here (other than the book 4 title) was not being able to use The Blood-Dimmed Tide for book 3. Jamie and I are both fans of Yeats, as you will have noticed if you read The Chronicles of the Magi novellas -- but there I had to pay out of my own pocket to use the poem, because Yeats's work didn't enter public domain till 2009, and we'd have hit the same problem with FL book 3. So we borrowed a line from Homer instead (oînops póntos) and took liberties with it: haîmops póntos, I suppose it would be, "the blood-eyed sea". Given that the book takes place on the Violet Ocean, maybe wine-coloured would have been a better fit.
