Huh … seemed like a lot more
I just got done compiling The Never Ending Battle (and making copies onto my external hard drive and my story CD) and I ran a word count on it, wanting to see how much I could trim and still call it a novel.
Only 50 thousand words?!? Are you kidding me? That’s novel length, but only just. I cut anything, anything at all, and I’m sitting on a Novella. Tighten it until it’s a really quick and easy read … it’s a Novelette! A freaking Novelette! I don’t even like the name! Novelette! It’s like the only female Smurf!
Man, it sure seemed like a lot more! I woulda sworn it was over a hundred thousand, at least! I thought it was a full scale om and here’s it’s only an omelet, at best. Depressing.
Umm, send to to the SF mags? Whichever ones are left, I mean:-(
Reading the various segments, I see a great potential for fleshing out some of the scenes, adding back-story, more description, & more characterization of the First-Time-Around Force. That’s if you want it to be a novel. If you want to preserve the somewhat breathless full-speed-ahead clean and simple prose, turn it into a long short story (I won’t call it a novelette) and cut ruthlessly.
BTW, don’t you think the time-travel startover thing smacks a bit of “Bobby wakes up and finds shooting JR is all a dream”? I’d like to see an alternate ending without that. That alone could up your word-count another 25,000.
BTW, don’t you think the time-travel startover thing smacks a bit of “Bobby wakes up and finds shooting JR is all a dream”?
Um … well … I guess, if one sorta squinted and held one’s head like this … yeah, I could kinda see the similarity between the two. Maybe.
The problem is that the entire “White House bomb blasts them into the past” bit was written about a month ago as the ending to the story. I had this dream, y’see, where the bomb blasted them back twenty-four hours, so they came to, naked and stubbly, on top of the case that just exploded. They figure it out and, realizing here was a golden opportunity, deliberately trigger the bomb again … and again … and again … and again … until they finally ended up sitting in a sub-basement that didn’t contain a bomb. Then they hide and wait, catching the people when they came to plant the bomb. (It was a fairly funny scene, three naked bald superheroes taking out their frustrations on the bad guys.)
I didn’t go with the extended ending the way I dreamed it because having the bomb go off over and over again was, in all honesty, stupid. It was hard enough to have three PhD’s drape themselves over a nuclear device in the hope of smothering the blast (which is pretty dumb to begin with), but to deliberately set it off over and over again? Who in their right mind would assume that they’d survive one such blast, much less a series of them?!? I could barely justify it as a sort of heat of the moment thing, something they did out of panic and because they were running out of time. “It’s a far, far better they we do” kind of deal.
Other than that, I loved the idea of them trying to smother the blast and someone, in a puzzled tone, wonders at the last second why they didn’t simply fly it over the ocean and dump it?
You really want an alternative ending, though?
Seriously?
Okay … it’s a challenge. I’ll do it.
Hi, Jim. May I start by saying I have been reading your work for many, many years now (I think I first read you the better part of 20 years ago in alt.callahans) and I have always enjoyed it. I have a copy of “Naked through the Snow” and “On the Subject of Penises” is, I think, the only thing that has ever made me literally cry with laughter. I am also NOT a professional writer, editor, or anything in the publishing industry except an end user of their products. If “The Never-ending Battle” was a painting, I’d be one of those people in the gallery standing in front of it saying “I don’t know much about art but I know what I like.” And I DID like it – as a short story. As a novel, my PERSONAL reaction would be:
1) Most of the characters don’t have enough ‘presence’ or ‘voice’ to stand out AS characters. Without re-reading it, apart from Dr Socks I can name Wanda (psychologist) Daniel (medical Dr, wasn’t he?) and Chuck (he was supposed to be the quirky member of the team – although I can’t remember why he was quirky). Oh, and What’s-her-name starting with B who got thrown out – and I never knew enough about her character to really understand why she wanted to unmask or what she hoped to achieve. Oh, and as I remember it the sex thing came up after she left – did she get hauled in for a few extra ‘conditioning’ sessions to convince her to be celibate the rest of her life? And there was the tough Vet in the wheelchair – would have like to have seen more of him. Other characters drift in and out, but for the most part you could simply call them A, B and C for all the impact they make on me as individuals.
2) Problems (interesting, insightful problems) appear one-at-a-time. There are one or two interesting conversations about each problem, but then their resolution is hand-waved away with “So we got Wanda to do extra monitoring …” or “There was a bit of a stink but it all died down in the end…” And then it’s time for the next problem, nice and neat in line. There are a couple of mentions that the Team is having missions in the background, but no real coverage of what sort of things they’re doing or how much of it or any problems that arise from particular missions.
3) Sorry, but I did not like the ending. Mainly because everything they’ve done, everything they’ve been through, all the problems they’ve faced, all the characters we’ve met are suddenly irrelevant, because they’ve gone back in time and changed the program and suddenly the problems don’t exist any more. A lot of build up is resolved in a few hand-waving paragraphs of “didn’t happen because we knew better this time”
I hope I’m not out of line with any of this, and of course I haven’t read any of your other novels, but these are the main problems _I_ (a non-professional nobody) see with _this_ work as a _novel_.
Have you tried selling your stuff as short stories? I can’t believe nobody would buy it.