New Project That's an Old Project

I'm working on something special at the moment.

See, although my husband and I write together, I usually do the grunt work. And, to date, the majority of our finished works have been built on my ideas. There's a reason for that.

Lee's brilliant, of course. And he had ideas he's played with his whole life.

The thing was, when we tried to implement those, build them into a story, we couldn't get anywhere.

Part of it was that they were still somewhat immature. Sort of Tenchi Muyo in the perfect spacecraft, but with even more sarcasm. There was a definite streak of comic book. The hero had implausible details and was too good at everything. His female crew was a little too devoted. And there wasn't a conflict. Everything was too easy for this hotshot, his exemplary crew and his super fabulous spacecraft.

We'd start and then, when we got to where we really needed a story, it would peter out, partly because Lee's idea kept growing up, getting more mature. Evolving.

I wrote (and rewrote) well over a hundred thousand words on this book. But we didn't get very far.

The cool thing is that there was some good work in there. Some spectacular battles, some very very cool speculative science in the ship and the weapons, some wonderful snarky dialog, and some very powerful passages that I would hate to lose forever.

So, Lee wanted to work on this project again. I told him he needed a plan, put it in writing so we'd have a solid (unchanging) base to at least build a draft.

And he did it.

So, we're going to see if we can salvage some of those cool scenes and fabulous speculative science, snarky dialogs and truly interesting (and now more interesting/less perfect) characters as well as a bit more gender diversity.

After all, I have to put in a bit of myself in there, too. I wonder how it will come together.

More on this later.