Saturday, June 19, 2010

A Decade Ago (This Past May)...

I began the first draft of Jaunt. Extrapolating from the (sadly, misplaced or lost) handwritten teleplay "Temporal Retrieve" I scrawled out in 1995, I recreated the first dozen pages of the half-baked idea, fleshing them out into what would become Chapters 1 through 5 of Jaunt. Mixing in dashes of The X-Files for inspiration, I chucked out all the Trek fanfic tendencies I'd picked up and unlocked a new avenue for my writing. Not technically the first novel I've written (I have one and-a-half complete Trek trunk novels hanging around here), it was the first wholly original long-form work of mine. I owe it all to the Pocket Books' Star Trek editors' FAQ, which, in paraphrase, said, "Don't bother submitting a first-time work."

And what would become my own playground, JauntWorld, was born.

Now, an Ether update. Two months later, and I'm nearly done with the first draft. My biggest obstacle is just pulling all the strands together to make the story end right. Ether certainly isn't as unwieldy as Jaunt's first draft, which tipped the scales at 160,000 words, and I think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 70,000 to 80,000. But I'm still under the hood tinkering with the mechanics.

I'm definitely eager to get this book in the bag!