In the Shadow of the Dragon -- Behind the Scenes... (Part One)

 

Okay First things first....

Update on Poisoned Honor. The first draft is in the editor's hands and I'm waiting to see what the notes are coming back. It's been a slog, but it is done. Now I need to wait for what needs to be rewritten....

My free story from June, The Specter of Winter, has been published in the Tales of the Inner Sphere anthology and can be found here: Tales of the Inner Sphere Anthology There are a lot of good stories in it.

Now, the purpose of this blog, talking about In the Shadow of the Dragon.

I'll admit, I did this one ass-backwards. The normal procedure is you send John pitches for novels (And you have to be an author he knows and trusts to get him to look at your pitch -- so if you want to write a Battletech novel, first prove you can wrote Battletech short stories for Shrapnel and do it consistently.) But I didn't do it that way, and the only way I got away with this was because John knew what I could do, having several Battletech novels already under my belt. If I had tried this as a newbie, he would have rejected it out of hand.

Nope, like an idiot, I just started writing it.

I felt there was a story there and when I started writing, it kept growing. I had the basic plot running through my head, a murder investigation leading to a political thriller. What I didn't have was anything to reference. I had two known characters : Yori Kurita and Matsuhari Toranaga and that was it. No political situation, nothing to reference. I had a blank slate.

I'll go over characters on another blog post, but I had to create a slew of characters to populate the novel, and I also had to create things like the CGC CID, as it had never come up in fiction before. Even dictatorships need police detectives to handle the street crimes. I used the excuse that Imperial City had been flattened during the Jihad to make changes to parts of the city. For example, the Imperial Palace now sits in the middle of an open plaza, while the Basin Lake Rehab Center come into being to take the characters outside the city and to facilitate an action scene.

I didn't work on it all the time; other writing projects came up and I worked on them, Since I wasn't on a timetable with Shadow, it took a couple of years to get it into a somewhat coherent form. 

Once the early first draft was complete, I sent it to John and asked, "Can you use this?" At the time, the draft I sent him was about 75% of what was actually published and somewhat raw. John replied that it was something he could use, and that lead to more work polishing it and  getting it into shape.

That's enough for now.... Next post will be about the characters and how they came to be.

Until then!!

Craig