Though it'd be amusing if they were illegible because of the ink Merlin used degraded over time. Preserving documents isn't always as simple as keeping them in a cool dark place. Or he spilled a drink on them once.

It doesn't necessarily have the same root word in Maya or Olmec or whatever. Lords of Distant Night could be as good a translation as Outer Night.

Nor does "outer" and "outside" mean the same thing, even without the added Dresdenverse meanings.

For basically the entire time your talking about, just knowing which ships are not going to make it into port would be extremely valuable. Also, the anti-tech field wasn't in play until after WWII.

I was thinking of the principle behind the anti-tech field, which is the natural order being grumpy at wizards. Fouling rigging or rotting planks seems like a reasonable inference of the effect that curdles milk.

In the old days, being able to instantly communicate long-distance would easily let you make a killing. It'd be even better if you could guarantee your ships would always make port (or that other ships didn't), though I think the anti-tech field would make sailing a high-risk activity for a wizard. Divination would let you time the market exactly, cashing out the day before the crash and re-investing at the market's lowest ebb would make obscene amounts of money.

If nothing else, the discipline required to become a wizard is an excellent transferable skill if the wizard can find the time to devote to some other craft.

Anyone check the usual length of time between "The End" and announcement of a release date?

We can crunch the numbers any way we want, it's not like we can draw any real conclusions.

First, there isn't enough data to actually do any (valid) statistical analysis.

Second -- and much more important -- Jim isn't delivering his manuscript to some predictable, homogenous, PerfectEditingEngine.  The publisher won't slurp up the draft and PEE out a hardcover in 4.61829 months.

It's a bunch of PEOPLE.  What other projects have they got under way, because they cannot just put the whole business on-hold waiting for the next DF novel; not even a guaranteed hit is worth that!  Maybe his editor is going through a divorce of their own, or moving, or just lost a pet, or is undergoing gender-reassignment surgery.  I dunno, what other reasons has Jim given -- valid, understandable reasons -- for being so much slower to complete this draft?  Maybe Jim's editor isn't playing "Keeping up with the Butchers," maybe they aren't hitting EVERY hardship Jim hit en route to finishing this draft.  Maybe they've got it worse.  We have no real way of knowing.  (n.b. I don't remember all of Jim's (very good!) reasons; I may have forgotten one or two, or added-in one or two that didn't actually happen to him).

True. But I'd hoped for a visible reason for some books to take six months instead of three to four; like apparently delivered on schedule vs apparently late. There are so many factors in publishing schedules, it was a forlorn hope but I thought I'd ask.

The soonest possible date is probably November or December but that would involve the publisher spending a few buckets of extra money, parallel edits and copy edits, a lot of *really* tight deadlines and betting there won't be major revisions of the manuscript. I think the publication process can be condensed down to about three months (which I think is the plan for GRRM's book) but that assumes writing and editing can be done in parallel. Given that the Dresden Files are a single POV in rigid chronological order, I don't think that can be done.*

More likely is spring or summer of next year, which is what most of me hopes they'll do. It tends to make for a better book and is less likely to burn out the author. I'd rather Jim get back into the rhythm of regular releases than go into a major editing crunch just to get the book out a few months earlier.

*I don't know how Jim's writing process fits into editing or what state his submitted manuscript is in. But what I've heard about the more common methods is that edits in later chapters can often mean revising previous chapters to make it look like they knew what they were doing all along.

Do we know if Peace Talks is going to be crash-published or are we looking at the usual 6-8-12 months to publish after the manuscript is finished?