I am excited that the kickstarter will soon be producing a beautifully illustrated Timeline for Valdemar! As far as I know, it is a general outline of important events, beginning from the detailed unofficial Timeline work by Joshua Murcray (with a little help from myself). The detailed dates from the Murcray website and googledoc have been uploaded here to the wiki Timeline but are under continual edit as new information is encountered. Also, I do not know if Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon added or adjusted information for the kickstarter version. But I've heard that the kickstarter hopes to provide updates if continuing research discovers important impacts to the general Timeline.
I have been working with Joshua (User:MerlynPrime) extensively on the Timeline for the last year and a half, combing the books for dates, and I think there are multiple reasons why a thoroughly researched public version has not yet been completed.
- Certain books or topics have simply not yet been analyzed by fans, sometimes due to lack of time data in the work. So there are big gaps in the Timeline. Talia's school days are documented, but undefined sequences like By the Sword part 2 or Take a Thief or the time elapsed between books can be a big question mark. I've only just begun Winds of Change, only a few guesstimated dates have been sketched in for the Owlflight trilogy, and I'm doing insane spreadsheets trying to coordinate tiny references for the gap between Magic's Price and Foundation. And thus haven't even started on the The Collegium Chronicles.
- The current work in Valdemar/Velgarth includes thirty-eight books (and sixteen anthologies) written over the course of thirty-five years. Combing through the books over and over again, searching for dates to cite, which are usually just casual references to age, year, sequence of events or even the weather, is incredibly time-consuming. Coordinating each tidbit with others, especially in different books, is complex. I end up with 5+ tabs and at least 3 ebooks open at once. And while hunting, I often get drawn into the story and enjoy reading it again for the umpteenth time instead of staying focused!
- My observation is that Mercedes Lackey is a fantastic artist who is carefully conservative about using dates. My interpretation is that she is leaving plenty of elbow room to write additional stories wherever inspiration takes her. Although she wasn't discussing timelines, in The Valdemar Companion interview she said, "I made sure I wasn’t writing myself into any corners when I first started the series."
- This means that dates may need to be interpreted, interpolated, calculated, hypothesized, or even arbitrarily assigned to come up with a fairly good sequence of events.
- Dates needed to be avoided in her first published works set in Velgarth: the Tarma and Kethry stories. The stories were not written in chronological order - they were creatively written to be sold as great stories featuring these characters, and they happened at different times in Tarma and Kethry's career. Desire for a timeline sequence for these stories has been a constant. Using clues, hints and a shoehorn, I have created an unofficial Interwoven listing of the Vows and Honor stories and novels.
- To create a good Timeline, it's important to me to cite the source for every entry. Winds of Fate includes information about events that took place in the Magic's Price era. Multiple books give information about events in the era of The Black Gryphon.
In conclusion, creating a Timeline for Valdemar is harder than you'd think, lol. I hope fans can enjoy it in the spirit that is intended. And you might want to check back at the wiki every once in a while and look at the page histories to see what's new!