"Flight of Dreams" was always meant to be a standalone short about them, but "Old Age Creeping Over Me" was the first of a what I intended to be a trilogy of novelettes to use as a fix-up novel. My editor liked the full set because the first one helps establish why Mark thinks it's worth dealing with the downside of a relationship with Steven, but senior management wanted the first section pruned drastically so that there's dramatic tension fairly early on.
So it turns out that one of the useful things I got out of the years on rasfc was learning to make commercial decisions about editing my own work, however painful it might be -- I could see why management wanted that change, even if I thought there was a good reason for constructing it the way I originally did, so I decided that the best compromise was to split the novelette off and put it on my website as a freebie. It would have been a lot harder to make that decision without the Hat Lecture. :-)
Flight of Dreams is perfect for a stand-alone and a very fine and enjoyable one it is indeed.
Old Age Creeping Over Me fits perfectly onto the beginning of L&M2 but, yes, I can see it as a middle section, but not as a beginning. Especially not given what then happens in L&M2 which is a much higher level of sustained tension. You'd need something dramatic to happen at the very beginning so that Old Age would be an interlude before everything else. Having siad that, I like the way that L&M2 has that underlying base-line tenstion right from the beginning and everything is happening on top of that. It's very effective.
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Date: 2010-01-02 02:12 am (UTC)*sends supportive thoughts*
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Date: 2010-01-02 12:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-02 09:15 pm (UTC)Oh, please do. Having just inhaled L&M 1 and 2 over the festive season I'm now completely hooked.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-03 12:05 pm (UTC)"Flight of Dreams" was always meant to be a standalone short about them, but "Old Age Creeping Over Me" was the first of a what I intended to be a trilogy of novelettes to use as a fix-up novel. My editor liked the full set because the first one helps establish why Mark thinks it's worth dealing with the downside of a relationship with Steven, but senior management wanted the first section pruned drastically so that there's dramatic tension fairly early on.
So it turns out that one of the useful things I got out of the years on rasfc was learning to make commercial decisions about editing my own work, however painful it might be -- I could see why management wanted that change, even if I thought there was a good reason for constructing it the way I originally did, so I decided that the best compromise was to split the novelette off and put it on my website as a freebie. It would have been a lot harder to make that decision without the Hat Lecture. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-03 03:15 pm (UTC)Flight of Dreams is perfect for a stand-alone and a very fine and enjoyable one it is indeed.
Old Age Creeping Over Me fits perfectly onto the beginning of L&M2 but, yes, I can see it as a middle section, but not as a beginning. Especially not given what then happens in L&M2 which is a much higher level of sustained tension. You'd need something dramatic to happen at the very beginning so that Old Age would be an interlude before everything else. Having siad that, I like the way that L&M2 has that underlying base-line tenstion right from the beginning and everything is happening on top of that. It's very effective.
Yes, the Hat Lecture was made for this situation.