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September 16th, 2007

Things Are Waking Up at Powys

After a long stupor, things over at Powys Media are finally starting to happen. David
McIntee's "Born for Adversity" and the "Shepherd Moon" anthology are both in
editing/typsetting, and pre-orders for both will likely happen in the next month or two. If
all goes well, Omega will follow hot on their heels.

Omega follows up on some changes to the Alphan universe that result from "Born for
Adversity" and one story in "Shepherd Moon" in particular offers something of a direct
lead-in to Omega, so Omega really has had to wait until this point in time. I finally sent a
first draft of Omega to Mateo this past week and also to John Muir (who's writing the
novel that will come chronologically after my story is out). There are bits and pieces of
Space:1999 mythology that either through good fortune or my own choices in working on
Omega will leave John with some cool stuff to play with in his book.

I've been listening to John Powell's music from the Bourne series as I work on Omega,
and it's been getting my juices flowing to work on my Prisoner novel, which is still
probably a couple years off. I miss writing thrillers! My Prisoner novel's going to be
much more like a classic Cold War-era spy thriller than a typical Prisoner story (in fact,
most of it will take place before the Prisoner ever gets to that island), and I'm really
jazzed about doing it.

What's been interesting about Omega is realizing how much the story is about
manipulation, and how the Alphans have been living under the influence of forces
outside of their control. We learn a little about John Koenig's early life as a result,
believe it or not. Poor Koenig's going to have some tough choices to make, tough
personal choices, in this story. But I suppose that's what gives humanity to fictional
characters.

I'm gonna miss these folks once I finish playing with them. As I read over the book, the
tone of it feels like Year Three ought to feel -- Year Two characters with Year One
seriousness and not a lot of comic relief. Working with Maya in particular has been
interesting -- I'm not portraying her as campy in the least, and Tony Verdeschi doesn't
make beer jokes. Koenig is a little less hot-headed in Year Three than he was in Year
Two, and Helena -- as far as I'm concerned, Helena is just Year One Helena, without the
damsel-in-distress flightiness that Year Two presented.

One aspect of working on Shepherd Moon is worth mentioning -- there's a story in there
written by four attendees of the Spacecon convention in Portland, OR back in 2003.
That's been an amazing experience, working with those folks. I got to sit back as their
collective editor (something I've never done before) and basically guide them in the
fundamentals of story architecture, which is very different from writing, and watch the
group of them craft a story out of sequence, focusing on individual pieces, and then work
collectively to polish the story into something cohesive. They collaborated very, very well
together and everyone was very sensitive about not offending their co-writers. It was a
lot of fun -- took longer than I think any of us anticipated, but I think the story is really cool.

It's weird thinking that I've been putting entries into this blog for over a year, now. I can't
wait for the book to come out since there are so many interesting things I'll be able to
talk about once people have read it that I really can't address now (you'll know why when
you read the book).

For everybody reading this, keep the emails coming -- they're a pleasant diversion and a
great opportunity for me to test the waters on some of the concepts coming in Omega
and beyond.

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