A tohle:
My original intent was to end DANCE with the two big battles, yes… intercutting between the two of them, each told through several different points of view. And both battles were partially written. But NOT COMPLETE, which became the issue. Also, maybe even more to the point, not yet good enough in my estimation. Battles are bloody hard, and I wanted these to be great.
The book had already been scheduled for publication, I had blown through several previous deadlines, and we simply ran out of time. Initially I decided to push one battle back to WINDS to focus on the other, but that did not work either, and neither of the sequences came together the way I wanted them to, so ultimately the choice came down to moving both of the battles to WINDS or cancelling the planned publication and pushing back DANCE. And given how far ahead publishers schedule their releases, the pushback would not have been a few days or a few weeks, but at least half a year, and maybe longer.
Also, DANCE was already very long, and the battles would have made it substantially longer. That could also have affected the pricing.
Did we make the right decision? I don’t know, even to this day. I understand your frustration, and some days I do feel the same way. But back then I had the fans howling after DANCE the same way they are howling after WINDS now, and my publishers really really did not want to push back again. And DANCE, even without the battles, was extremely well received — yes, there were dissenters, I know that, readers who did not like the book as well as the earlier volumes, but out in the wider world, DANCE had extremely strong sales, rode the bestseller lists for a long long time. It was a Hugo finalist, won the Locus Award for best fantasy of the year, and was named by TIME magazine as the book of the year. So even without the battles, it worked pretty well… but part of me still wonders if we made the right choice.
These things are not easy. Those who think they are have obviously never written anything, or had to deal with the realities of publishing.