I was lis­ten­ing to last week’s Dead Robots Soci­ety, an inter­view with Scott Sigler. For the three of you who don’t know who Sigler is, he was one of the founders of pod­cast fic­tion. Sigler has par­layed giv­ing his stuff away for free into a small press con­tract, a 5-​book deal with Crown (owned by Ran­dom House) and start­ing his own pub­lish­ing com­pany. An unknown when he started releas­ing Earth­core in 2004, he now makes a liv­ing from his fiction.

Sigler always wants to give his read­ers the best pos­si­ble prod­uct, and as such, he tends to rewrite with every new release of his books. The small press ver­sion of Earth­core was dif­fer­ent than the pod­cast ver­sion, and the ver­sion he’s writ­ing for Crown will be dif­fer­ent still. By the time he gets to write it, eight years will have passed since the orig­i­nal pod­cast. He’s going to have to update every­thing to incor­po­rate new devel­op­ments in min­ing tech­nol­ogy and new dis­cov­er­ies in biol­ogy. His edi­tor at Crown has a sta­ble of sci­en­tific advi­sors to help Sigler make the new ver­sion as accu­rate as possible.

And therein lies the prob­lem. At con­ven­tions and sign­ings, Sigler is asked more than for any­thing else when the sequel to Earth­core is com­ing out. After all, it’s been four years since the pod­cast, how long are peo­ple expected to wait? But as Sigler pointed out on DRS, he can’t write the sequel, Mount Fitzroy, until he rewrites Earth­core for Crown and knows, based on the new require­ments for the story, which char­ac­ters live and die.

What does all this have to do with lit­tle old me? Glad you asked.

When I made the only-​one-​week-​to-​go-​before-​the-​madness deci­sion to push Sins of the Moth­ers off until next sum­mer and do Rev­e­la­tion for NaNoW­riMo, I got a fair amount of grous­ing. Some of the folks in my writer’s group were look­ing for­ward to some­thing new, rather than a reboot of a 13 year old story. But you see, my hands were tied the same way Sigler’s are. (At least metaphor­i­cally. I don’t want to know how Sigler’s hands are tied literally.)

Even though to the best of my knowl­edge, Sins of the Moth­ers would only con­tain a few of the char­ac­ters from the other Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles books, I don’t know that for sure. Going into it last month, I didn’t really know much about the Neme­sis War itself (book 5 of the series). I didn’t really know what the other two major races, the Dalindo and Vertrusk, were like, and how they might have influ­enced the male Sendeni sol­diers. I didn’t know how Sophie encoun­tered the Neme­sis, which awak­ened the telepa­thy in her. Other than Cha­lyl, I didn’t even know what other Sendeni offi­cers would appear in the book. And the more I thought about it, the more I came to the same con­clu­sion Sigler did about the sequel to Earth­core. I have to write the books in a series in chrono­log­i­cal order, because oth­er­wise I won’t know how they fit together.

I can see how right I was already, only three days into NaNoW­riMo. While Rev­e­la­tion starts off at roughly the same place as Between Heaven and Hell did with Daniel Cho help­ing out at the scene of a car crash, only shifted to 2010, just over 6,000 words in it’s already veered dra­mat­i­cally away from the plot of the orig­i­nal, with Daniel escap­ing from a police sta­tion and marked as a fuga­tive, pos­si­bly a ter­ror­ist wanted under the PATRIOT act. The new Susan Richard­son is a con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian blog­ger rather than a plucky reporter, the new Jeff Frankel is a Viet Nam vet instead of Korea and a whole lot kook­ier and Jack Har­ris plays a key role that didn’t even exist in the orig­i­nal as the FBI agent track­ing Daniel. While 80,000 – 100,000 words from now I’ll still end up at the same place as the end of the 33,000 word novella, with the angels and demons revealed to the world as sci­en­tific fact, I have a very dif­fer­ent way to get there, and that course will define the events that fol­low. I can already see the rip­ples pro­pogat­ing down the time­line (Daniel will work for Jack in Cru­sade, rather than the other way around, and Jihad will be very dif­fer­ent), mean­ing that Mis­taken Iden­tity will have a very dif­fer­ent his­tory to build on than it did when I first wrote it in 2002. That will lead to dif­fer­ent assump­tions about the Neme­sis War, which again, brings us to what, by the time I get to writ­ing it in June, will likely be a very dif­fer­ent take on Sins of the Moth­ers than what I orig­i­nally had in mind. A richer, more vibrant and fully real­ized take, and I’d be a schmuck not to take advan­tage of that.

Which means, unfor­tu­nately for my writer’s group, that they’re going to see the reboot of Between Heaven and Hell before they get the new space opera stuff. But some­how, once they see how dif­fer­ent what I’m doing now really is, I don’t think they’re going to mind.