I needed to be able to write Ex-Isle fast and clean with no hesitations or wrong turns. Knowing this, I made a decision. I would do something I hadn’t done in years, something I swore never to do again. I would outline the book.
Now, to explain, outlines and I…we don’t have a great history together. There were some fun flings back during our shared school years—a little dabbling, you might say—but in the end we figured out that we really weren’t right for each other. If I get involved with an outline…well, I end up blindly following it. No matter what. Even when it’s really clear that things should be going another way, I keep following the outline. It’s a bad habit I’ve never been able to break.
It took me a while to figure out I’m much more of a pantser, as some folks like to call it. I do much better with loose guidelines and general directions than a solid map. It’s a method that has done very, very well for me, overall, and some of my most popular books have had the least amount of planning behind them. If someone else happens to work well with outlines, that’s fantastic. They’re not for me, though. Nowadays, if an outline and I see each other at a party, we make excuses to never cross the room so we can keep the illusion of civility.
But I figured these were desperate times. And I think many of us here have gone back and done things we know we shouldn’t during desperate times. I just figured this time I’d know what I was in for. I would outline the hell out of the book—every chapter, every beat, every character moment. But I’d also remember that I had a say in it and watch out for the traps and blind alleys that I was following for no reason. Everything would be fine this time.
It didn’t work out that way. Shocking, I know.
Oh, sure, it was fun and easy at first, but after a few weeks the outline and I were butting heads. Things slowed down and by the two-month mark we were being very passive-aggressive toward each other. And, as always happens in these cases, it’s the book that gets stuck in the middle, wondering what it did wrong.
I ended up trashing about a third of what I’d done with the outline, starting over, begging my editor for more time…and, well, you’re holding the result.
Moral of this story—if you’ve got a system that works for you, don’t go revisiting one you know doesn’t.
Especially not when you’re on a deadline.
All that being said, there are a few folks who deserve some thanks for all of their help.
Mary answered questions about scurvy, nutrition, and other medical things. Also, double that thanks retroactively to her and Tansey, who both helped me with the original science behind Project Krypton’s super-soldiers.
Thom gave me so much information about submarines I felt guilty not using more of it. Marcus answered random questions about military terminology at all hours.
The Eden garden is loosely based off the Sepulveda Garden Center just north of Los Angeles. I spent many hours walking back and forth through the garden plots, occasionally asking questions of different folks, and getting answers that ranged from enthusiastic to mildly horrified. There were also a few odd looks as I bounced myself against the back fence again and again.
Any mistakes or flaws are entirely my own, some deliberate for narrative reasons and some because I wasn’t clever enough to understand what was being explained to me.
David and John both looked at an early draft and caught a lot of things that my outline-scarred eyes could no longer see.
My agent, David, set things up so I could continue the Ex series with a little break to write The Fold.
My editor, Julian, is clearly the most patient man in the publishing industry. He forced his way through a barely-over-the-outline-breakup draft of this book, then gave me a chance to turn it into the (hopefully) much more entertaining book you’re holding.
Finally, many thanks to my lovely lady, Colleen, who reads early drafts, indulges my long rants with absolutely no references, puts up with my whining and anxiety, makes sure I don’t forget anything, and somehow sees all of this as some kind of a positive in her life. No, I don’t know how, either. But I’m very thankful and happy for it.
—P.C.
Los Angeles, October 21, 2015
(Back to the Future Day!)
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