After further negotiation, Michael and Matt reached an agreement with Vivisphere. Matt would select, arrange, and edit the essays. He would also format the book. Michael would write new material for the book. Vivisphere would publish it.
Putting the actual book together required several months' work. Matt downloaded and reread all of Michael's Suite101 essays. He also looked at some other essays Michael had written. He began culling the list of more than 100 articles to produce a suitable collection of essays. The theme of the book, "Understanding Middle-earth", had been agreed upon early in the project. The concept was to continue Michael's exploration of Middle-earth's depth but with a tighter focus on certain areas of interest.
"Matt suggested that my writing was maturing and moving in a certain direction," Michael explains. "He wanted the VME sequel to be more than better than the first book. He wanted it to be like a butterfly coming out of the coccoon." Matt began arranging the essays in groups, feeling the chronological order for the chapters in Visualizing Middle-earth was too haphazard for the average reader. "I had originally thought I might just publish the essays in archives," Michael says. "But I had already skipped some for Visualizing Middle-earth. So, Matt felt there was no point in returning to that plan."
One of the new passages Michael needed to write was an introduction, but before he could set fingers to keyboard, Matt contacted Michael about the essay titled "Browsing the Compleat Tolkien library". "This was a very definitive statement about which works I trust," Michael says. "Matt wanted to use it as the basis for the introduction. The reader would be told right off the bat where I was looking for most of my information. I liked that idea."
Michael and Matt then agreed that two more essays would be required for the book. These were to be previously unpublished works. One was "How the Elves have changed". The other was an essay about Tom Bombadil which Matt had specifically suggested, but it failed to meet Matt's expectations. "Matt wanted something very different from what I was able to write," Michael says. "So, I told him to make the decision. I didn't think I could say anything else about Bombadil (and the Eagles, another topic Matt had suggested)."
The Bombadil essay was dropped from the project, but Matt was busy trimming other essays which were still to be included. Some of the edits required Michael to go back and rewrite segments. And Matt found some areas where new information had become available since the essays were originally written.
