Being Asked to Add Material
CPE Gaebler writes and asks when is the first time I was asked by an editor to add material to a story.
Let me explain the basis for his curiosity: I am almost never asked that, not once, but several times, I have gone over the word count limit editors have asked for. For example, my short story ‘Awake in the Night’ was more than double the acceptable limit posted by Andy Robertson in his NIGHT LANDS website. I wrote a short story for the Jack Vance tribute anthology called SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH where I also flagrantly, and to my discredit, went over the upper limit, and I asked the great Garden Dozois to send me the manuscript back. He replies in words akin to those of an NRA member — ‘you will get this manuscript out of my cold, dead hands’ — so apparently he found the manuscript acceptable despite that I was a scofflaw.
Unless I am misremembering, and it was the great George RR Martin who said that. The co-edited the work, and collected what must be the greatest names in the fantasy field, from Silverberg to Gaiman in the anchor position, peppered with names like Tanith Lee and Dan Simmons midmost.
In both cases, I am very grateful to the kindheartedness of the editors involved, and chagrined at my inability to write work to specification like a professional can do.
However, on one occasion, even I with all my orotund loquaciousness, was asked to expand rather than cut material.
I fear that if I tell you, some reader seeing the information will detect a seam or discontinuity in the work which otherwise would go unnoticed.
But, despite that risk, let me speak. Potential spoilers for an unwritten book below the cut:
The editor asked me to split what was originally going to be the concluding volume in the Orphans of Chaos duet into a two, making it a trilogy, due to shelving considerations — if the second book were too fat, we could not get it distributed in chain bookstores. He asked me to add an additional hundred pages or so.
Fortunately, I had written notes and scenes for a proposed sequel, including a scene I very much had wanted to include in this story. The final book was split into two, now called FUGITIVES and TITANS OF CHAOS, and the extra material, where the youngsters learn more about how to use their powers, forms the first part of the third book. I then rewrote sections of the battle scenes that form the end so that everything they learned got put to use.
The visit to the deserted island (which is indeed, a real deserted island) and the trip to Mars (and astronomers can figure out what year the scene takes place, because I established the orbital positions needed for a Hohmann transfer orbit) were written after several scenes of the running fight which leads from the department store to the woods to parallel dimensions.
Originally, I had meant the Mars trip to be the opening scenes of a proposed sequel EXILED FROM CHAOS, but now the opening scenes concern Amelia’s life as a waitress in a truck stop known as the Chicken Pit near-abouts Cumberland, Maryland.
The entrance to Hell is near there (sorry, Marylanders) and the young Chaoticists are nearby, and take the blame, when Ixion, with the aid of a goddess who shall remain unnamed, Sisyphus and Tantalus break out of Hell, eager for revenge against the Lord Descender (Jove)who imprisoned them — but the trio is disappointed to find him no longer among the living. Jove’s older brother Hades, who is blind, reports not seeing Jove in Tartarus.
Intrigue and hi-jinks ensue.
I was planning on using a version of Tantalus whose crime was that he wanted to spread the food of the gods among mortal man, a motive perhaps which modern Americans might find more sympathetic than ancient Greeks; and Ixion a man of implacable justice, whose crime was that he retaliated in kind when Jove seduced his wife.
If I ever get that book written. I have several other projects in the hopper, and a day job.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
