DUNE 7 BLOG

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

The Great Exchange

Another draft done, another swapping of files . . . then back to the beginning again.

I completed the third major edit on SANDWORMS (104 chapters right now with the current arrangement, about 650 pages) at about 3:30 in the afternoon, then quickly wrote up a detailed letter for Brian, explaining some of the major shifts and revisions, a list of weak spots, chapters or character interactions that still need work, then packaged up the FedEx envelope and raced off to meet the 4:30 pickup deadline.

Yes, I know it would be so much easier if Brian would get an e-mail account . . . ohhhhh, so much easier . . . but for the time being we're still shipping files via the mail. At least I got him hooked up to a fax machine. And we're finally upgraded to flash drives instead of Zip disks, or even diskettes!

But I digress.

As collaborators, Brian and I are very much in synch. Sometimes eerily so. After I drove into town to drop off the FedEx package with SANDWORMS, I returned home only to find that in the fifteen minutes I was gone, a FedEx package had arrived from *him* containing the files for HUNTERS. Perfect timing.

As I described in an earlier blog, I spent a week in Utah working six 12-14 hour days just to make a lot of progress on the edit of SANDWORMS. Of the many other writers I've met, Brian is one of the very few who works as many hours as I do. No matter how focused I am, no matter how productive I manage to be, Brian keeps up with me. Once we get a deadline in our heads -- even if it's one that we ourselves concocted -- we adhere to it rigidly. That's the only way we're managing to do two massive DUNE novels at the same time without tripping over each other.

So, now Brian is starting the fourth edit of SANDWORMS while I do the fifth edit of HUNTERS (which currently stands at 92 chapters and 640 pages). Each time through, the books get better and better, with gaps filled in, rough spots smoothed over, contradictions fixed, descriptions made more vivid. In January, finally, we'll show HUNTERS to our editors.

--KJA