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A Pirates of the Retail Wasteland Timeline
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Jan. 20th, 2007 | 08:33 am
Now that the revisions of "Pirates of the Retail Wasteland" are approved, meaning that the copy I have is the finished version, minus the copyedits, I'm getting my "Pirates" folder organized with all of the early drafts. Man, have I put a lot into this.
May, 2001 - I get the idea for the book during an orientation class that I took before my second hitch at Starbucks
June, 2001 - a first draft is written. In this version, the action centers around 3 bored, self-absorbed college students who fancy themselves to be socialists. It was intended to be an adult book, but I ended up deciding it was probably more of a YA.
Spring, 2003 - I finally get around to editing and expanding it from about 40,000 words to about 60,000.
June, 2003 - the expanded version is revised
Nov/Dec, 2003 - another major revision, including 15k more words. It's at this point that Trinity, the protagonist of the song Punk Rock Tango Girl is written in as a side character; the song already referred to The Cage, a place referred to in the early version of the book. A lot of the rewrites connect the book to the album Suburban Post-Modernist, which I was finishing off at the time.
2004 - my then-agent passes on the book. I put it on a shelf for another day and get to work on the project that became How To Get Suspended and Influence People instead.
June 2005 - Suspended sells; I start thinking about having Pirates be the sequel. I tried one draft where I just took what I had and changed the names of the characters to "Leon," "Brian," and "Edie," but it didn't work well .
September 2005 - first attempt at writing "Pirates 2.0", this time with Leon, et al, in high school. Many scenes from the original version are still present. The opening page of this version was practically the same as the first page of the 2003 version. A shorter version of that page shows up at the beginning of one of the later chapters of the final draft.
October 2005 - about 50 pages into Pirates 2.0, the version is scrapped. Instead, I spend October writing a surreal juvenile mystery called "The Ultimate Hot Dog," which, actually is another revamp of a book I started writing in Fall of 2000. Not sure what will happen with that one, but writing the draft got me back into shape to get back to work on "Pirates."
January 2006 - Started Pirates 3.0, still incorporating one or two scenes from the original version. In all, I'd say maybe 2-5 pages worth of text from the original ended up copied and pasted, and a few of the side characters (Trinity, Troy, and a couple of characters in the coffee shops) from the original version are present, but just about everything newly written for Pirates 2.0 in the fall is gone. I decided that I could have more fun keeping them in 8th grade than moving them up to high school or college right away. You have to do enough backstory in a sequel without having to fill in what happened in a long gap between stories.
Spring 2006 - just under five years after the project was first started, the book sells.
August 2006 - the first draft of Pirates 3.0 is revised and expanded just a bit before being turned in.
November 2006 - Random House gives me a sketch of the cover
December 2006 / January 2007 - major work is done to edit the draft, adding a couple thousand words (and cutting about 5-7k), streamlining it remarkably. One side character from the original draft who was previously left out is given a cameo after all. Copyedits will come through in couple of months, give or take a few, and then the book will actually hit the shelves early next year. So it's a long, long process, but the timeline does include very long stretches in which the project was on the backburner.
I'm finally satisfied now that I've made it the best book it can be. There are still plenty of good scenes in early drafts that I'd like to cannibalize for other books eventually. The 75k word version may have tossed in the junk pile in the end, but it makes for a fine junkyard for me to root through. Maybe I'll have a big "deleted scenes" extravaganza on the web some day in the far off future - I've already picked out a few deleted scenes from "Suspended" that I plan to put online eventually.
I like writing up timelines like this - "Suspended" isn't quite as involved as this one, though there's a long progression of unrelated ideas stretching back to about 1995 that eventually led to it. "At Last, Okemah," the screenplay which may be filmed this summer, also has a long timeline. Others projects would have much, much shorter timelines, but I'll post those when the projects are actually completed!
May, 2001 - I get the idea for the book during an orientation class that I took before my second hitch at Starbucks
June, 2001 - a first draft is written. In this version, the action centers around 3 bored, self-absorbed college students who fancy themselves to be socialists. It was intended to be an adult book, but I ended up deciding it was probably more of a YA.
Spring, 2003 - I finally get around to editing and expanding it from about 40,000 words to about 60,000.
June, 2003 - the expanded version is revised
Nov/Dec, 2003 - another major revision, including 15k more words. It's at this point that Trinity, the protagonist of the song Punk Rock Tango Girl is written in as a side character; the song already referred to The Cage, a place referred to in the early version of the book. A lot of the rewrites connect the book to the album Suburban Post-Modernist, which I was finishing off at the time.
2004 - my then-agent passes on the book. I put it on a shelf for another day and get to work on the project that became How To Get Suspended and Influence People instead.
June 2005 - Suspended sells; I start thinking about having Pirates be the sequel. I tried one draft where I just took what I had and changed the names of the characters to "Leon," "Brian," and "Edie," but it didn't work well .
September 2005 - first attempt at writing "Pirates 2.0", this time with Leon, et al, in high school. Many scenes from the original version are still present. The opening page of this version was practically the same as the first page of the 2003 version. A shorter version of that page shows up at the beginning of one of the later chapters of the final draft.
October 2005 - about 50 pages into Pirates 2.0, the version is scrapped. Instead, I spend October writing a surreal juvenile mystery called "The Ultimate Hot Dog," which, actually is another revamp of a book I started writing in Fall of 2000. Not sure what will happen with that one, but writing the draft got me back into shape to get back to work on "Pirates."
January 2006 - Started Pirates 3.0, still incorporating one or two scenes from the original version. In all, I'd say maybe 2-5 pages worth of text from the original ended up copied and pasted, and a few of the side characters (Trinity, Troy, and a couple of characters in the coffee shops) from the original version are present, but just about everything newly written for Pirates 2.0 in the fall is gone. I decided that I could have more fun keeping them in 8th grade than moving them up to high school or college right away. You have to do enough backstory in a sequel without having to fill in what happened in a long gap between stories.
Spring 2006 - just under five years after the project was first started, the book sells.
August 2006 - the first draft of Pirates 3.0 is revised and expanded just a bit before being turned in.
November 2006 - Random House gives me a sketch of the cover
December 2006 / January 2007 - major work is done to edit the draft, adding a couple thousand words (and cutting about 5-7k), streamlining it remarkably. One side character from the original draft who was previously left out is given a cameo after all. Copyedits will come through in couple of months, give or take a few, and then the book will actually hit the shelves early next year. So it's a long, long process, but the timeline does include very long stretches in which the project was on the backburner.
I'm finally satisfied now that I've made it the best book it can be. There are still plenty of good scenes in early drafts that I'd like to cannibalize for other books eventually. The 75k word version may have tossed in the junk pile in the end, but it makes for a fine junkyard for me to root through. Maybe I'll have a big "deleted scenes" extravaganza on the web some day in the far off future - I've already picked out a few deleted scenes from "Suspended" that I plan to put online eventually.
I like writing up timelines like this - "Suspended" isn't quite as involved as this one, though there's a long progression of unrelated ideas stretching back to about 1995 that eventually led to it. "At Last, Okemah," the screenplay which may be filmed this summer, also has a long timeline. Others projects would have much, much shorter timelines, but I'll post those when the projects are actually completed!