Several people have emailed me over the past months asking me how I plan to handle the darker elements of the Lay of Leithian and it seems others might be wondering the same thing. This is the temporary answer:

Now, obviously on the one hand I can't answer that straight out, because that would be Act IV spoilers on a massive scale. (One reader, however, has put the clues together and guessed part of it, which I've admitted.) But that's only half the story, so to speak.

In addition to The Script, I have a number of First Age stories, some done, some still WIP, some only outlined on my hard drive, which are all indexed under the listing "In Years of the Sun & Moon." One of these is itself a series, called "For One Year of the Sun," and the subtitle of the series is "Asides & Meanwhiles," and that can be read two ways — either in regards to the original Silmarillion texts, or in regards to The Script.

They don't have to be read to understand each other. Both are independent works, just as the freestanding story "Hunting," set during the traverse of the Ered Gorgoroth and inspired by LL1, Canto III. The styles are totally different -- the other stories are very impressionistic in an Eastern European derived style as well as being unmitigatedly stark. Assumptions are made and given in both series which you don't have to accept for the other to make sense. But they are the result of a single unified vision, being expressed in two modes (three, if you count drawing.)

In an ideal world, the next three stories would be finished simultaneously with the Enteract, which they chronologically intercut, so that you could if you wished go directly from "Sun-Year's Setting" to Act IV. That's not going to happen unless I delay The Script several more months, I suspect, and I won't do that to readers!

However, they're not essential, just adjunct, to the Script. When they're done, "Above the Fray" and "Holding" will add nuance to Act III, but are not intended to replace it, as "Staying" will to the entire play. (Although I think that as a single multichapter series on its own, "For One Year of the Sun" will work when finished independent of The Script also.) The Script will always be able to be read as an integral work, without requiring knowledge of the darker stories.