Ask Powys a Question. Any question.

[Eric L. Busby]

I would LOVE to know what long range plans you guys might have. Will there be more books in the future? This has been quite a treat in recent weeks. I hope there will be more.

[Mateo Latosa]

We’ll be making an announcement soon regarding future releases. Suffice it to say, in my best book-eating zombie voice, “More books….”

[David A McIntee]

[b]Ultra wrote:[/b]
[quote][b]PatS wrote:[/b]
[quote]And if I ask if it is a coincidence that the planet on the alternate cover art looks like Meta from Breakaway, will you answer? :huh:[/quote]

He’ll probably say that it looks a bit more like Ariel from Last Sunset…

although there is a striking similarity to Meta as well. Perhaps some SFX of Meta were re-used in Last Sunset??
[/quote]

Other way round, sort of – Meta, as seen on a viewscreen in Breakaway, is the planet for Ariel flipped so it’s a mirror image and fed through onto the monitor. I suspect the effects crew happened to be working on that planet effect while the live action crew were filming the scenes for Breakaway and it’s just chance that it happened to be the globe that was handy for pointing a camera at at the time…

[Patricia Sokol]

I’m thinking it is just a coincidence after all, then. Stock photos and all.

Ah, well.

-P.

[MARK PASSMORE]

Do you keep a data base or some record of every Moonbase Alpha character, in particular the incidentals, that were used in the series and in your books so that you don’t kill someone twice, for example?

[David A McIntee]

[b]mtpassmore wrote:[/b]
[quote]Do you keep a data base or some record of every Moonbase Alpha character, in particular the incidentals, that were used in the series and in your books so that you don’t kill someone twice, for example?[/quote]

Dunno about Powys generally, but in my case, pretty much- I downloaded everything of that nature that I could find on the web, and made a reference CD. And of course I have the whole series on DVD.

ETA- I saw this question come in on my email and thought it was a reference to me saying about the use of the reversed planet image – forgot it was the “ask Powys” thread!

I’m so vain, I probably think the song is about me…

[Howard Drabek]

Everyone is talking about ordering ALPHA. I have Born for Adversity and Omega. I don’t see a link to order ALPHA. I clicked the link at the back of Omega and have the famous hand picture but nothing more. Help!

[Mateo Latosa]

Click on the hand. 🙂

[Howard Drabek]

Yeah I guess I wont win a Nobel prize for smarts. Got it. The order is in.

[Michael Schwartz]

[b]mateo wrote:[/b]
[quote]Click on the hand. :)[/quote]
I would have said, “Do what Paul Morrow was about to do…” 😉

[Joe]

I am very excited about the new Space 1999 books. I’ve read the earlier ones and am halfway through Born for Adversity. I think the concept of publishing books on demand is innovative and might have possiblities beyond Space 1999. Dark Shadows has had 3 books published that did reasonably well, but did not make any sort of a splash. It occurs to me that this might be the sort of franchise that could prosper here. I believe that most DS fans, like Space 1999 fans would be willing to pay more for a regular string of books. I’m not sure where the rights stand. I know Tor published the last one, but I’m not sure if they are still up for grabs. Would this be something worth considering? Other franchises I’d love to see include Lost in Space (if done the way the Innovation comics handled it with Bill Mumy supervising), Logan’s Run (I think the TV series characters had possibilities that went unexplored in the TV show), Planet of the Apes (I’d love to read anything from the movies, or either TV show), UFO (actually this one might be the most logical one for you guys), and I’m sure there are countless others.

[William Latham]

We’ve talked about other franchises, including some of those mentioned. We’ve even come up with some story pitches in testing feasibility. Hollywood being Hollywood, sometimes “how much money up front” and then an impractical amount (in the same sentence) stops us from pursuing the franchise any further. Licensing has come a long way since George Lucas snapped up the “garbage rights” as they were called back then for a little franchise he was developing with 20th Century Fox (and cost Fox what some estimates conclude is an amount in the billions – that’s not a typo). Once upon a time, novelizations of films/television episodes were the only real licensed products on the market (along with the occasional movie soundtrack). Now, licenses can be directly or indirectly impacted by remake plans, relaunch plans, you name it, and sometimes the same arm of a studio that licenses key chains would be making decisions on original novels.

So, we toy with the idea sometimes. We may toy with it further, but we probably wouldn’t talk about it until we had an official announcement to make.

Thanks for the question!

[William Latham]

On the Creative Process…

In response to Pat’s question on the creative process and how we keep characters consistent across books, this is both a difficult and easy question to answer. A lot of it has to do with picking writers for projects who are already knowledgeable about the series (whether it’s Space:1999 or The Prisoner) – going in cold (as yours truly can testify) puts a lot of pressure on the editor to listen for false rings in characterization and the author who must absorb a lot of existing material to get up to speed. Having someone already familiar with the franchise obviously makes things a lot easier. For the most part, we seldom have to remove characterization gaffs – what’s more challenging is making sure the characters grow out of their existing depictions. Sometimes, the editor’s job is encouraging the author to push the envelope a little. At the outline stage in a novel, you can generally get a sense of how well characters are acting like themselves. Coming up with a plot that stretches the characters and lets us learn new things about them is probably the biggest hurdle for both editor and author, but it’s also the most satisfying.

From the author perspective, I guess the easiest way to describe it is to go with a food analogy – if I close my eyes and eat peanuts, I can tell they’re peanuts. If I switched to pistachios, I know they’re pistachios. My senses tell the old gray matter what’s coming in. When writing, you get the “taste” in your brain of Koenig, or Russell, or Bergman, and then their dialogue comes out. It’s probably a gross-oversimplification of the process – there’s some “method acting” in there, too. Stereotyping offends us (as it should) in most contexts – it’s similar to the concept of indexing in computers (for the geeks out there) – it’s a shortcut that represents something larger – working with the shortcut, the representation, means you don’t have to absorb that which is represented every time you want to work with it. So your experience of a character gets stereotyped, or indexed, in your head, then you can play-act with that stereotype. The danger in writing, just as in software, is if the index, or the stereotype, doesn’t accommodate changes (the so-called corrupt index in software) – if John Koenig suddenly goes blind, my stereotype of him needs to change – if it doesn’t, and I write about Koenig and he can see, my character is ringing false. Don’t know if any of this really made sense, and other authors may experience it differently. But this is all a better answer than the truth – when I’m writing Victor Bergman, Victor Bergman comes out. I don’t know that I fully understand the mechanics of it, but it’s fun when it happens!

Except when it’s Balor.

[Ally Davies]

A bit of a random question I know, but…why did you chose the name POWYS MEDIA?

I live in Wales and Powys is the name of a county and as I drove through it earlier today it reminded me of the first time I came across you and initially assumed you had some sort of Welsh connection.

I’m sure none of you have welsh ancestory so why the name?

Procyonstar 🙂

[Mateo Latosa]

Powys Media is named after the renowned scientist Delmer Powys Plebus Gwent. Because I wanted something 1999-related, but not overly so. And I thought it sounded sufficiently “bookish”. That’s the short and sweet of it really.

Mateo 😉

[Author]

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