Aftershock & Others by F. Paul Wilson

Author:F. Paul Wilson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: A Tom Doherty Associates Book
Published: 2009-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

1996

If we call 1994 The Year God Laughed, and 1995 The Year of Vaporware, what can we call 1996?

How about The Year Without a Short Story?

For the first time since I began writing in the late sixties, I went a whole year without producing a single short story. Blame the interactive work. It devoured not only time but ideas as well.

But let’s not dwell on that. Let’s call 1996 The Year of Fools. (You’ll understand soon enough.)

Things started off well with the publication of Virgin. Mary had a ball going to signings.

Matt and I started meeting with Sharleen Smith who ran the SciFi Channel’s Web site. We were discussing ways to bring our idea of an interactive deep-space adventure to the Internet.

In February I signed two film options. One for The Tomb that landed at Beacon Films, and another with LIVE Entertainment for The Select. (I’d previously turned down an offer from Touchstone I’d thought too low.)

About this time Matt and I conceived the idea of a series of novels based on the FTL Newsfeed stories we’d been creating. The spots were being scripted, filmed, shown, and then filed away, never to be seen again. We wanted something a little more permanent for our better story lines, and knew they’d translate well to print. Since the SciFi Channel owned all rights, we’d need their okay.

So one day in February Matt and I and a network representative who shall remain nameless pitched the series to Susan Allison and Ginjer Buchanan at Ace. They liked the idea. Matt and I hammered out a proposal and brief outlines of the first couple of books. Everyone was happy…until the ScifiChannel announced the enormous licensing fee it wanted—so exorbitant that it wasn’t worth Ace’s effort to publish the series. Matt and I tried to explain to anyone who’d listen that this was the only after-market they’d see for FTL…this was found money. They wouldn’t budge. The deal died.

Fools.

I passed the first hundred pages of Nightkill to Steve Spruill for his turn with the writing, then faced the problem of starting the final medical thriller of my three-book deal. I was blanking on a medical plot, but I had this neato-keen idea for a techy thriller. I knew of only one guy who could handle the job of protagonist…a guy I’d left bleeding to death more than a decade before: Repairman Jack. But the contract called for a medical thriller. I shrugged and had a doctor hire Jack to find Christmas toys stolen from some kids with AIDS. I titled it Legacies. I was off and running with Jack again. I didn’t know that I wouldn’t be able to stop.

The Mirage CD-ROM project was picked up by AND Interactive, an intensely talented group of artists and programmers with an office near Beverly Hills. We felt they’d do a great job.

On one of our L.A. trips Matt and I met with the folks at Digital Domain. Their boss, James Cameron, was planning on making a film about the Titanic disaster and they were looking to do a related interactive CD-ROM.

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