Ahh, 1994. Bill Clinton was president of the United States. Nelson Mandela became the first black president of South Africa. Comet Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter, George Foreman hit Michael Moorer, and the Lion King hit EVERYTHING. It was big, y’all.
Harry Styles, Dakota Fanning, and Justin Bieber came into the world, while Jack Kirby, Dinah Shore, John Candy, Kurt Cobain, Raúl Juliá, and Cab Calloway all left it. Doesn’t seem like a good trade, but no one asked me, so. (that’s actually only a swipe at one of those born in ’94, by the way. I have no opinion on the other two.)
Another movie released in 1994 was the Star Trek “bridge” movie passing the torch from the original series (TOS) to The Next Generation (TNG)–aptly titled Generations.
This post is not about that movie.
In 1994, I had nothing to do with any of the above. I was working as a Jack in the Box drive-through cashier and also as nanny to three children, and dreaming of writing books but doing very little actual writing of anything. But 1994 was the year I decided I needed to change that. Writers, I reasoned, should write things.* Or they should not call themselves writers.
Enter this poster.
I snagged it from work because duh. It was a free Star Trek poster. I used it to get myself to write most days in 1995, and finish my first novel. But this post isn’t really about that, either.
It’s about the fact that I wrote this flippin’ book I’m trying to work on right now in nineteen ninety-five. I knew nothing about Marines, little about space travel, not a blasted thing about story structure or plotting, pacing, beats…all the things that have me head-desking now. I mean, give me a break–the internet was only just becoming available to the common folk. I, a drive-through cashier and nanny, hadn’t even heard of it. (I mean, I’d heard words. The father of my work-children worked for America Online. He paid me for a weekend of kid-sitting with my first computer! On which I wrote my first novel!)
Anyway. The problem is, I wrote this book 25 years ago. I love it–or rather, the idea of it–and I love the characters. I don’t want it to be a trunk-novel. I want to fix it. I want to share it.
I want to set fire to it. You may have heard the oft-repeated NaNoWriMo advice, just add ninjas? Well, I’d never heard of NaNoWriMo (probs because it didn’t exist yet) but I felt this advice in my soul and I followed it. Too much talking going on? Somebody shoots at them. Oh, I don’t have an ending for this scene? Blow something up.
This novel is A. Mess.
This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to edit this novel. No, this is the Weightiest First Draft ever, of which I brag in my bio, and I have attacked it over and over again and still it defeats me. It’s a more reasonable size now–but it makes, it turns out, even less sense than it did before. And I can’t just chuck it all and start over, because, you see…it’s a Dream’verse novel. It’s the first Dream’verse novel, and stuff that happens in it is mentioned in Knight Errant, His Faithful Squire, Captain’s Boy, Even the Score and possibly even Queen’s Man. (Which books I totally haven’t been rereading to make sure I know what I can’t change, nope, not doing that, that would be procrastination and I have stuff to do…am I the only writer in the world who doesn’t cringe at the thought of reading her finished works? I see that so often and–ahem.)
Naturally the least-sensible, should-be-removed-or-maybe-exorcised-and-definitely-buried-and-never-spoken-of-again story events, are the stuff that got mentioned in the chronologically-later books. Oops.
So yeah. Feeling pretty darn sorry for myself over here. But honestly, I brought it on myself. I chose this. Because I do love this story, and I am eager to share it. If I can just wrangle it into a readable shape…
I can. I will. And I hope you’ll love it.
*Like, ever, I mean. Just because I attempted to write every day, doesn’t mean someone isn’t a writer if they don’t.