I'd never planned on making Beltrunner a series. Hell, as far as I was concerned, the story had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and when I closed the book on Collier and Sancho and Fletcher and the rest of them, I thought their collective story was done.
When Beltrunner came out an started getting reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and a few other places, a curious pattern started to develop: some (not many, but not an insignificant number, either) mentioned wanting to read the "next book," saying they were "curious how it was all going to end."
Huh.
That was the spark that made me think gee whiz maybe there's more to say about my stubborn, heroic, and often foolish asteroid belt miner and his faithful but malfunctioning computer. I hadn't really thought of it at the time, but these two broken people (one broken in the psychological sense, the other actually broken) were perfect for one another. Their relationship had more in it, and certainly the main plot (and the MacGuffin I'd invented*) hadn't truly been resolved.
But what really got me thinking hard was when I started to hear Collier and Sancho again. They were talking in some other room of my mind--not to me, but to one another, and though I couldn't make out what they were saying they were clearly not done talking. That faint murmur grew, and the itch to go back to them returned.
Plus, I think I knew deep down that the way I ended Beltrunner and what had become of the MacGuffin was unsatisfactory. There's a razor-thin line between saying too much (giving away too many answers to mysteries better left unsolved--something I maintain was the downfall of what would become the first in the Star Wars movies, the Phantom Menace: too many questions from the iconic 1977 movie were answered, and those answers were somewhat banal. A similar fate threatened to befall Clarke's sequel to 2001, a book called 2010) and saying too little (giving the audience the impression that you, writer, weren't really sincere in your own plot machinations, and that ultimately they were just contrivances to create artificial wonder not grounded in anything. The television show Lost fits rather neatly into this category, as do many other shows that have a kind of "shallow depth.")
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah.
I think I came to realize that there was more to say with the plot, with my buddy main characters, and even with the setting itself. Collier's character arc was not yet done, but had in fact only begin to bend. Sancho, though one of my favorite creations, hadn't really come into his own as much as I would have liked (what happens to him in the latter part of Beltrunner was, I realize, a beginning rather than an end).
A lot of high-sounding prose, yes? Like I am some kind of classical composer who yet has his Magnum Opus to write? Calm down, O'Brien. It's a sci-fi yarn about a man and his computer chasing rocks.
What finally did it for me, despite all this literary criticism, was that Collier and Sancho were just plain fun. I loved writing them, or listening to them, and I missed them.
All I needed was a story. I'll talk about how that came to be later.
Be seeing you!
When Beltrunner came out an started getting reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and a few other places, a curious pattern started to develop: some (not many, but not an insignificant number, either) mentioned wanting to read the "next book," saying they were "curious how it was all going to end."
Huh.
That was the spark that made me think gee whiz maybe there's more to say about my stubborn, heroic, and often foolish asteroid belt miner and his faithful but malfunctioning computer. I hadn't really thought of it at the time, but these two broken people (one broken in the psychological sense, the other actually broken) were perfect for one another. Their relationship had more in it, and certainly the main plot (and the MacGuffin I'd invented*) hadn't truly been resolved.
But what really got me thinking hard was when I started to hear Collier and Sancho again. They were talking in some other room of my mind--not to me, but to one another, and though I couldn't make out what they were saying they were clearly not done talking. That faint murmur grew, and the itch to go back to them returned.
Plus, I think I knew deep down that the way I ended Beltrunner and what had become of the MacGuffin was unsatisfactory. There's a razor-thin line between saying too much (giving away too many answers to mysteries better left unsolved--something I maintain was the downfall of what would become the first in the Star Wars movies, the Phantom Menace: too many questions from the iconic 1977 movie were answered, and those answers were somewhat banal. A similar fate threatened to befall Clarke's sequel to 2001, a book called 2010) and saying too little (giving the audience the impression that you, writer, weren't really sincere in your own plot machinations, and that ultimately they were just contrivances to create artificial wonder not grounded in anything. The television show Lost fits rather neatly into this category, as do many other shows that have a kind of "shallow depth.")
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah.
I think I came to realize that there was more to say with the plot, with my buddy main characters, and even with the setting itself. Collier's character arc was not yet done, but had in fact only begin to bend. Sancho, though one of my favorite creations, hadn't really come into his own as much as I would have liked (what happens to him in the latter part of Beltrunner was, I realize, a beginning rather than an end).
A lot of high-sounding prose, yes? Like I am some kind of classical composer who yet has his Magnum Opus to write? Calm down, O'Brien. It's a sci-fi yarn about a man and his computer chasing rocks.
What finally did it for me, despite all this literary criticism, was that Collier and Sancho were just plain fun. I loved writing them, or listening to them, and I missed them.
All I needed was a story. I'll talk about how that came to be later.
Be seeing you!
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