DUNE 7 BLOG

Wednesday, March 8, 2006

'Round the Clock

It's a silly cliché that authors sit around, staring into the distance, waiting for the Muse to inspire them. Instead of an ethereal feminine voice for inspiration, my muse is more like a gravel-voiced drill sergeant.

"Anderson! Stop daydreaming, sit down, shut up, and WRITE!"

And so it goes around the clock here in our two-writer household. With the very heavy workload we're currently under, Rebecca and I have to squeeze the most out of every day.

I have just given Rebecca the eighth draft of HUNTERS, and now she's holed up with the manuscript, going over every line with her sharp editorial eyes and red pencil. Meanwhile, she turned me loose on our current novel, which I'll be working on at the same time as she does her final edit on HUNTERS.

We've been married fourteen and a half years, written close to thirty books together, and by now we've figured out the routine. We do have slightly different personal schedules -- I'm a morning person, she's a late-night person -- and so in times like these we actually move into different camps.

I've taken up residence downstairs in the guest room next to my office, so I can get up and go to bed according to my mental preparedness, and I can work without interruptions. Meanwhile, she's barricaded herself in the office in the master bedroom, so she can work as late as she wants. We've stockpiled pre-made food so we can grab something to eat whenever we need to, we shut the doors, ignore the phones, and just write and edit all day long.

While Rebecca combs over HUNTERS OF DUNE, I am in the midst of the second volume in our Young Adult fantasy series "Crystal Doors." Most of my collaborative work with Rebecca is for young adults, including the 14-volume series of YOUNG JEDI KNIGHTS as well as works based on STAR TREK and TITAN A.E. Our young adult books have been bestsellers, translated into many different languages, and received the "Golden Duck" award given to the best Science Fiction for Younger Readers. This new series (the first volume of which will be published this June in hardcover by Little, Brown) is about two modern-day cousins transported to an island much like Atlantis, where they find themselves embroiled in a sorcerous war with an undersea people called the "merlons."

I'm not sure how much overlap in readership there'll be between Crystal Doors and Dune, but I wanted to keep you all in the loop. It has been a process of "switching mental gears" here from science fiction to fantasy, from complex Dune to a more straightforward young-adult story, from sandworms to sea serpents. The best part is that Crystal Doors: Ocean Realm is only about 260 pages long, compared with 600 pages for HUNTERS OF DUNE.

Within a week, Rebecca will emerge from her seclusion with a marked-up draft of HUNTERS. After handing the CRYSTAL DOORS manuscript back to her, I'll read HUNTERS through one more time just for a final OK, and then I will deliver it into the hands of the publisher's copy editors for full-scale production.

And by then Brian will be finished with his next draft of SANDWORMS, and I'll start work on that -- while doing my final edit on SLAN HUNTER, as mentioned in the December 23 blog, and then begin work on Seven Suns #6.

'Round the clock!

--KJA