Over the past couple of months I've realized there's a fifth book to the Seasonal series. I sensed it was there all through the pre-writing and writing of Summer, which was a novel that had to go one of two ways: I mean there was always the possibility, as I was writing it and its resolutions, of a totally other, different, completely liberated 'end' or addition to the sequence, a book that pulled free from the structure and went off on its own tangent. I thought of it, throughout, as the other Summer. Now I know there's definitely a book, probably called Seasonal, as slim as Autumn. It's a book that breaks the pattern open, simultaneously connected and disconnected to the others. In doing this it makes the sequence true. What I know about this final novel (final to me though it will be able to be read in the sequence at any point) is that it's a vagabond novel, a first person narrative without a home, something both ancient and contemporary, discrete from the others but still open enough, if readers want this, to be the narrative of any of the characters who've stayed on the margins of the four extant novels and whose stories remained untied to the resolutions in the last one. It'll pass through all four seasons and reassert their seasonal openness, after the particular narrative satisfactions / closure of Summer. It'll break them into real freshness.
