The Saga Continues

So, back in the early 90s when Doug and I stepped back from our manuscript for On the Rocks and a voice from on high said “now it belongs to the ages”, I just kept writing. I simply wasn’t finished. I mean, we had been writing feverishly for months and I was totally In The Zone. Although we wrote the book as a stand-alone and we were both happy with the book’s conclusion, the ending clearly left the door open for the Next Adventure.

Scenes, characters, dialogue kept running through my head, so I sat down at ye olde word processer (I was still years away from my first PC) and started banging out pages. I wasn’t writing this with any expectation of publication. This was really more for my own mental well-being. All these scenes, all this dialogue, all these moments were rolling around in my head and I need to get them out of my head and down on paper. Although I had an idea where it was going, this was mostly just free-writing.

I hadn’t consulted with Doug before I wrote all this. Oh, I didn’t hide it from him, but at this time I was back in Denver and although we had always kept in touch, once On the Rocks was done, we both moved onto other projects. At some point we must have had a conversation or two about it. Doug has recently been cleaning up and preparing to move out of his apartment and he came across a big fat envelope that I had mailed to him back in 1993 (Postmaster General: Benjamin Franklin). I don’t know that he ever opened it or read any of it but when we decided to go ahead with a sequel, I presented him with my work and he gave it a resounding “yeah sure why not”.

The prologue picks up within days of OTR’s conclusion, then Part One leaps ahead to a year later. Most of what I wrote was sort of a “where are they now” kind of thing, catching up with the doing of protagonists and antagonist alike. I don’t want to get into details about the plot as it might provide spoilers for events that happen in OTR, which I assume you are reading. I put about 130 pages down on paper before I finally slowed to a controlled stop. Then I cranked out about another 20 pages of various scenes that occur later in the book. Some of the scenes started in the middle of the action and ended without any conclusion. There was just some bit of action or exchange of dialog I want to get transcribed before it left my head. Finally, that too wore down. I was now entering areas of the story that required further research, plotting and structure. In Trump-World parlance – I got bored.

Fast forward some thirty years or so. After Doug and I finished adapting the story to an alternate history format, made our re-writes, consulted with beta-readers, made more re-writes and launched the book on Kindle, we looked forward. We realized that on the off chance OTR should score a hit, any publisher is bound to ask if there is a sequel. In fact, now more than ever before, books such as ours usual come in a trilogy. That is when I dusted off the old manuscript (pays to be a pack rat) and told Doug that we had a head start on Book 2.

The main plot to Book 2 is pretty straight forward. As I re-read it, I did indeed have to ask “What idiot wrote this?”. Some of the scenes made me smile. They were, and are, quite good. Other scenes will require major surgery, and after the bandages come off, might be quite unrecognizable. And there are a few that we will just have to take off the saddle and shoot in the head (take yer damn hat off son!). This new book, which I had already dubbed Straight Up, needed work. In many places I either left the reader in the dark with no explanation to why or how, assuming they had followed me all though OTR. In other places I put long and boring Information Dumps that dragged the pace to a crawl.

We have since fleshed it out, created a formal outline and begun both expanding on my original first draft as well as writing brand new scenes. Book 3 is at least penciled-in, with a general idea of what will happen and how the overall story arc will end.

So, while we work behind the scenes at getting On The Rocks onto airport newsstands everywhere (even my fantasies have mellowed with age), Doug and I are working on the continuing adventures of Arthur, Lyme, Natalie and Romanov. There will be familiar faces, blasts from their pasts, several new enemies and at least one surprise that even made Doug say “oooooh!” with eyebrows raised on high. The stakes are going to be raised as our heroes find themselves thrust into even deeper international intrigue.

If you haven’t read On The Rocks yet, best prepare now. Load it onto your Kindle, phone or PC and enter an amazing world that could have been. By the end I hope you’ll be eager to find out what happens next. I know I am.