Through a series of e-mails and a secretly recorded Skype session with the creative principals, Tor.com has learned that New York Times bestselling author John Scalzi is planning a multi-million dollar musical theater version of the Hugo-nominated tale “Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City”—and that this planned musical extravaganza may already have reached a creative and financial crisis.
The cache of e-mails obtained by Tor.com show an author at first enthusiastically engaged in the creative process of a show that he optimistically described as “Bigger than Rent and Urinetown combined (as unsanitary as that sounds)” but who then quickly found himself overwhelmed by the demands of his financial backers and locked in struggles with his various creative partners. Observers close to events describe Scalzi as having retreated into a “Nixon-like world of paranoia and delusion,” from which he refuses to emerge.
[It is a dark night, and stormy too]