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Mysterious unknown forces gave us the same three letters in our last names — which put us in the same homeroom in high school! See the Author’s Note at the end of Eternity Unbound for more information…
Glad you enjoyed it. I actually hear this pretty frequently, that people think they’ll have to suffer through “Eternity Unleashed” and then end up enjoying it more than “Resurrection” even though the folks on Alpha don’t appear.
On names…
[spoiler]Since Omega and Alpha were written before I’d read Born for Adversity, safe bet to say this one was just luck of the draw. We did know that canon reflects Koenig’s middle name as Robert, so people wouldn’t be expecting a switch on that. But I think you could make an argument that Koenig’s concerns about names could just be post-traumatic stress making him a little paranoid — that’s one for readers to decide for themselves.
Adantia, by the way, is an interesting name. Sometimes when I pick names, they just come out of the air (Adantia was originally Adentia — I liked the “Arra with Teeth” sense but backed away from it). Now that I look at the name, I can see my subconscious at play. As a child, I had two “surrogate” grandmothers (had real ones, but these two were much bigger influences on me) — Aunt Ada and Aunt Edna — not my intent, but I can see it now. Much as the hero of Eternity Unleashed is Talian’s sister — I thought the name Milsa just sounded cool — now, years later, I can giggle at how my brain works — my twin sister’s name is Lisa![/spoiler]
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.
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!
I’m gonna miss the puns…
To PatS and Procyonstar — you rock our world right back. It’s all just print on paper until readers bring it to life and you’re certainly doing that.
Thanks to you both.
BL
Didn’t get to use hands down, handsome, manhandle, underhanded, hands out of the cookie jar, Hand and Chewie, I wanna hold your… 🙁
Absolutely awesome posting, Pat.
Any monsters with one eye around (Cyclops?). Actually, more than one!
There’s another odyssey that influenced Space:1999 — be on the lookout for that, too…
[b]kalthon wrote:[/b]
[quote]I don’t believe there is a genuine and committed writer around who works in a vacuum, so I can see how dispiriting that can be.
[/quote]My apologies to Meredith! Crickets should sing when they want to sing!
But on Simon’s statement, we writers are only human — we always like to hear it when we do well and we always cringe a little when we hear we didn’t. A thick skin comes with putting your words out to the world — at least with time.
The excitement we saw when the new site was launched told us more than anything else that we’ve done good things — at least in the past. The sheer number of people who’ve visited the site and are actively posting feels really good.
The act of writing, as many here can attest, is its own pleasure. Being read is a very different pleasure, and both reading and writing are solitary activities (until Resurrection audio book parties begin to spring up). Getting people excited about some future event and then watching their anticipation build over time is also fun.
It’s all good. But Simon’s right — we live in age where appreciation must often be inferred rather than directly experienced. It’s part of the isolation that makes the modern world frustrating for many people.
Isolation and appreciation and how we all interact with each other — the timing of all this is fascinating to me (and thoroughly unplanned). You’ll be reading about these very things very soon as experienced through some guy named Koenig. Maybe even in the next week or two.
Nice to know we’re all on the same page! Or soon will be…
Poor “Eternity Unleashed” feels so left out… 🙁
I’m TOTALLY kidding you!
Seriously, thank you right back. Mateo and I were just on the phone today, kidding each other about our long held belief that silence is unfortunately golden — if a Powys book is wonderful, you can hear crickets (not you, Meredith!), but heaven forbid there’s a typo!
During the doldrums last year (and the year before, ugh!), we knew we had all this cool stuff waiting on the tarmac — it feels really, really good to finally see things taking flight.
Did you know Spongebob Squarepants helped get Born for Adversity out? Spongebob entertained Tierney Grace Latham (age 5) for fifteen minutes while her dad was making quick updates on lulu.com to get the book out. It’s all a balancing act and it’s postings like yours that really, really, really make it all worth it for us. When we finish a book, we really don’t pat ourselves on the back and applaud ourselves for finishing a book. We imagine people at home with their noses in between book pages and imagine their expressions when they get the book in the mail — so the stories you tell us on this forum really mean a lot to us!
Thanks again, Pat!
I’m just so happy someone referred to something I’m doing as potentially radical!
Some of my fondest memories of working on the whole Omega project are the phone calls Mateo and I would have where we couldn’t remember where we’d left off and we’d have to retrace our steps. It got to the point where we started having to take notes (which is dangerous when you’re talking on the phone during the commute home). That process went on for months.
Clock’s ticking down, folks. It’s coming…
It’s interesting to note how much genuine horror there is in the original series (quite a lot!) but many fans don’t like the horror aspects, while others do. I know just looking at the photographs in the old novelizations, you’d think this was a straight out horror series. Cabot Rowland’s final appearance is as bad as most stuff in Resurrection! Granted, it’s not everybody’s cup of tea. I think Space:1999 has a lot of Professor Quatermass lurking around in its subconscious, and the Quatermass stories certainly didn’t shy away from horror.
Balor, however, is definitely a horror character, not a science fiction character — Balor’s intent is to create fear, the very essence of horror. But I think you could make an argument that we pushed the gore in Resurrection a little to see what we could get away with, and when it was approved, that set the bar for us. Old Hollywood trick — always leave the censors something to trim by going just a little overboard.
