Journal Entry #33: January 16, 2009
I've been struggling over the past few weeks, trying to come up with a concept for the novel that will appear in 2010. For me, it is easily the most difficult part of the process. Give me a reasonable idea for a narrative, and the novel will write itself. What's a reasonable idea? If, say, it's an Alex Benedict novel, then I want a mystery and a reasonable solution. The mystery should not be the sort of thing one finds in many whodunits, i.e., who's the murderer? Rather, it should grow from a seemingly inexplicable event. How do seven people vanish out of a starship in flight? In a place where no planetary surface is available, and no aliens are in the picture. Where the solution is reasonable. Give me that and the rest is, well, I won't say easy, but the brute work is done.
Years ago, I was at a con, and was assigned to a panel on something or other. One of my colleagues was asked about concept. How do you come up with an idea for a story? 'It's easy.' he said. 'I have more ideas than I'll ever be able to use in a lifetime.' And I thought, sure. One idea is that there's a vampire in the penthouse. And another one is that there's a vampire in the laundry room. And another in the boss's dining room.
Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm the slow kid on the block.
Anyhow, that's what I've been wrestling with since mid-December, or maybe a bit earlier. Once I'd decided I didn't really want to spend the year rocking back and forth on the deck, the heavy lifting began. I got so much pleasure out of writing Time Travelers Never Die, that I considered doing a sequel. (Usually, in time travel narratives, major consequences hang over the action. Unless we intervene, Dr. Pashkin will buy artwork from the young Hitler in an attempt to stave off World War II. What will really happen is that a happy Hitler will indeed not bother going into politics. But somebody smarter will take his place, will not invade the USSR, and the world in 1945 will be divided between the voctorious Nazis and Joe Stalin.) I thought something more homey, and less desperate, would constitute a nice change of pace. Maybe the time traveklers are looking for Uncle Henry, who made off with one of the converters, but he has the keys to the car so they have to find him.
Well, maybe not.
The problem with any time travel novel is that if you can move through time, you can do pretty much anything. E.g., we can go back an hour or so and intercept Uncle Henry before he can leave. Do you need a fourth for bridge? You make up your mind that tomorrow morning you'll use your capability to return to that evening to provide the missing partner. Consequently, you show up, and you have your fourth. That means, of course, there will be two of you in the game, but no harm is done.
I also had been thinking about doing a novel in which we watch a 22-year old Priscilla Hutchins make the decisions that will take her away from the Joint Chiefs (for whom she plays the drums) and put her on a path for the stars. Then there were suggestions from some readers that a follow-up novel to Cauldron is called for. And another idea suggested by Alfred University's David DeGraff while replying to a question: The curious business of the near-miss by an asteroid that no one saw coming, followed a few days later by a sizable rock that does fall into the Pacific, followed in the folloeing weeks by still more debris in the sky. What's going on? I like the idea and wouldn't be surprised if it shows up in 2011.
In the meantime, I finally settled on the concept I had originally set for the young Hutch. Can't go into the details, other than that I couldn't make it work. Until I realized that if I divorced the Academy from it, it was the perfect setup for Chase & Alex.
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