I’ve seen people talk about actors and artists that had a terrible time.
My own would be Anne Rice. She wrote Interview with the Vampire after her young daughter died of Leukemia. Then her husband suddenly died of a brain hemorrhage. I suspect her Christian, anti-fanfic phase was a result of mental illness and manipulation from the publishers, although I don’t think she ever apologized.
Eric Nylund.
I absolutely loved the first two books in his Mortal Coils series. But Tor bought the rights to the series, and after the first two came out, Tor decided it wouldn’t publish more sequels but also wouldn’t revert the rights to the books back to him, so he has this great, unfinished series that the publisher won’t even let him finish on his own as a self-pub or with another publisher. It’s some serious BS.
For another reason entirely, Eric Nylund basically wrote the book on Halo’s universe outside the games. And his Halo Books were good.
Then they dumped him and hired Karen Traviss to shit all over his good work with her military fetish complex.
Why did tor want this?
He did a great job with the three Halo books he wrote, as well
I’m re-reading All That Lives Must Die right now and literally came here to make the same post, haha. Hopefully, Mr. Nylund can obtain the rights to his books soon. (Even though we have been waiting 10 years since the last one.) From the books’ footnotes, we sort of know how it ends already so I guess the wait isn’t too bad, but I’m still so insatiably curious about the ending of the series. Plus the character work is just phenomenal; I need more time with the characters.
Ugh I know, it’s been years since I read those books and I still think of them often. Screw Tor!
You should definitely give them a re-read! Maybe it’s because I’m older now, but I’m catching so much stuff this time around that I missed. Also, the humor. The book is subtly funny AF. The foreshadowing is brilliant as well.
About the author though—do you think he’s retired and possibly given up on the series now? As far as I can tell, he hasn’t published anything in a while.
Doesn’t seem like his personal website is updated but according to Wikipedia he came out with a 2-book series called The Hero of Thera more recently with the last one published in 2019 which isn’t that long ago. Looking at it, it kind of seems to have a similar vibe as Mortal Coils. I might give it a try.
For some reason I thought that was published in 2017. Also, I think it’s a Lit RPG. I’ve never played/read one of those before. I may give it a try too.
He wrote the tie-in novel for the original Halo: Combat Evolved, which basically set up the narrative for all the following games, including and especially Halo: Reach.
Fall of Reach is great and often gets a lot of deserved praise. I see Combat Evolved often get overlooked or skipped, people assuming it’s just a rehash of the game; Master Chief moving from room to room clearing enemies. But he managed to really write around that a lot, create some great original characters who’s doomed fate really hit hard. McKay was a great character, fleshing out Jenkins was awesome. And Keyes being assimilated was heartbreaking.
That’s where I know him from hahHa
Well, he wrote the Prequel and two sequel novels; one to Halo Combat Evolved and one that runs concurrently to the events of Halo 2.
Halo: Fall of Reach and Halo: First Strike are the prequel and sequel to Halo:CE, and Ghosts of Onyx is the one concurrent to Halo 2.
The book tie-in for Halo: Combat Evolved was written by William Dietz and it’s not very good.
Unlike Nylund’s work on Halo, which is fantastic.
Oh, my bad, yes The Fall of Reach is the book to which I’m referring. It played a big part in establishing the mythos of the franchise and is GOATed.
This is like my worst fear, and the reason I still haven’t submitted any of my own books (approaching the end of my 47th novel!) – even if I could get one accepted, the fact that publishers can just control your book for decades just makes some part of me balk.
I think I mentioned this in one of my replies, but a lot of this is down to the agent who negotiates the contract for you.
Thanks. Have to do more research, i guess.