PROJECT FROM HELL

It's a new year and there are new projects.

For the last month I've been getting organized on a major rewrite. The project started more than twenty years ago.

Here's the back story:

I had written four in shared world novels for a book packager called Byron Preiss Visual Publications, a situation I sort of lucked into.

In the late eighties I was contacted by an editor at BPVP about writing a juvenile in a series called ROGER ZELAZNY'S ALIEN SPEEDWAY. I ended up writing two of the three novels in their contract.

Later, I got the idea the editor had confused me with some other writer, one who had already published novels. (I had not; just a dozen or so stories in magazines.) Apparently my performance met the minimum requirements.

They offered me what I thought was a ghost rewrite of a first draft an author was abandoning for greener fields. I did that one and another one in that universe, called DR BONES.

At that point I decided to step away from shared world work. They suggested I come up with an idea for my own series. I did that, they said okay. Time dribbled past. I held out for a copyright in my own name, and some other more standard provisions in the upcoming contract. There was slow movement in that direction.

Then the editor left.

Six months later I suggested maybe the project was dead. BPVP countered with a contract for six books--but they all had to be completed in one year or they would own the series outright for something like $3000. I would also have to write a bible to assist the authors who would complete the series.

I countered with the idea of turning the project into a shared world deal, in which several authors would toil (myself included). They said (quite rightly) my name was not big enough to sell a shared world series.

They suggested I get an agent to finish the deal. I got an agent who suggested I walk away from the deal and sell the series directly to a publisher. I said okay; no sale was ever made.

After a while the agent dropped out, and the project languished.

In the mean time, I moved away from the vaguely sketched novels of the proposal (there were to be six of them) and wrote a single volume that covered maybe the first three chunks. It ran 125,000 words.

Rather too long for science fiction.

I was also worried about ending the book in a cliff-hanger.

Over time, I cut the novel severely in order to make room for more material, pushing the story closer and closer to a firm resolution (at least, firm enough for volume one). I made that work, but couldn't get another agent to handle it.

I went on to other stuff.

Now, in the more straightforward world of indie publishing, I find I can revive the project. I still want to avoid a cliff-hanger ending of the first volume, but the problems of how long I can go (or how short) have vanished.

A traditional publisher doesn't want to take a chance on a long book. Production expenses make the project risky. And they absolutely won't publish a short novel (or novella) in a stand alone edition, unless the name of the author makes it a sure thing.

But I have no worries on that score.

My main problem is the wealth of versions I have to work with. I dug around in my pile of floppies and came up with 54 disks covering this project. Some only had a few chapters, but most contained at least one complete version of the novel. And some contained two.

All in all, a crap-load of words to work with.

I spent a long time making notes on the various versions. Characters came and went, cut for considerations of length. The story extended just so far in some, went further in others, included "special" circumstances in others (material that encroached on the stuff of future volumes, giving away too much at once).

It was a nightmare, of course.

(Remember Y2K? I actually got caught up in that, several times. The program I was using [Volkswriter 4] was not Y2K compliant; dates on saved files were messed up. As a result I loaded up what I thought was the most recent version of the book and began making revisions. Maybe twenty thousand words in I became aware I was making stylistic changes I could have sworn I had already made, months earlier. I had. Turns out I was not working on the latest version at all. I had to convert the texts to rtf and run the two versions in Word, comparing them for changes. There were hundreds of differences, some in red, some in blue. Some changes I wanted to keep, some I didn't. A day of craziness. And I actually made that same mistake TWICE in a year and a half. I finally took the plunge and converted the book to Word, which I've been using since. At least the save dated are accurate.)

Doing what I'm doing now is maybe twenty times worse, with multiple versions competing for a smooth rewrite. And I have to jump through loops to convert the old Volkswriter files, where every single line terminates in a paragraph mark, for use in Word.

After weeks of grinding I have now got a single version together, sloppily compiled from the texts found on many different disks. I still have character name-change confusions to straighten out, and so forth. It's a copyeditors vision of hell in there.

But it's coming together. Another couple of weeks of rewrites and I'll be ready to convert to HTML and lay in the smart punctuation and paragraphs styles. Then it's on to proofing the thing in my browser, ahead of shoving it through KindleGen.

I'll let you know when it goes up on KDP.