The first draft of R. Scott Bakker's THE UNHOLY CONSULT is done!!!

R. Scott Bakker just announced that he completed the first draft of The Unholy Consult! This from his blog:

So I finished the first draft of The Unholy Consult 3:14 pm, yesterday afternoon. Things are feeling kinda surreal – it’s been a helluva long haul, man! There’s still a tremendous amount of work to be done. I have exhaustive rewrites planned for a couple of the plot-lines – about a quarter of the book all told. But for whatever reason I became insanely meticulous fleshing out the master plot, and even though it remains uber-generic all the way down, I’m pretty sure nothing like it has been written before. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, I don’t know. The best I can do is take it to the limit of my abilities and nothing more.

I remember having lunch with Guy Kay and Peter Halasz in Toronto not long after the publication of The Darkness that Comes Before. After explaining my ridiculous multi-volume blueprint for the series, Guy earnestly began trying to talk me out of the notion. He started listing all the notorious foibles of the high fantasy long form, how the plot-lines ‘bush,’ how the quality of subsequent installments drops off as the author’s enthusiasm inevitably wanes, and how it was simply impossible, given the sheer creaking weight of all the verbiage that has come before, to provide a climax that was anything but anti-climactic…

“But imagine,” I replied, “a multi-volume series as tight as single book!”

I’ve been imagining ever since. I already had a preposterously long list of goals: to avoid sentimentalism in all its nefarious guises; to portray a truly septic ancient world, one as steeped in bigotry and brutality as was our own; to portray psychologically realistic characters; to sustain a lyrical scriptural tone; and to resist ideological anachronisms - to challenge rather than pander to the inevitable moral pieties of certain readers.

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