The 30 Year Gestation

I GPS my memories. I might not recall the day or year, but I remember the place and how it felt. One of my earliest memories is somewhere around age two, in the living room, light streaming in through wide metal venetian blinds. When I think of it now, my jaw shifts and I bite down lightly at the back of my mouth — the same thing I did as a kid, back when I still had baby teeth.

I remember where my first wife said, "We're getting divorced." I remember where I met my second and forever wife in 1981 — my front door.

And I remember the beginning of the GW Canyon story. Home. Vail. Hot tub. Evening.

The "room" where it happened. The idea that led to the GW Canyon series got off to a hot start.

It was a transitional time in my business career. I'd bet twenty years of equity from my first company and rolled it into a tech venture with no guarantees attached. That night, looking up at the Milky Way, an old Twilight Zone episode came to mind — "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," 1963, William Shatner. (For the TV and film buffs: written by Richard Matheson, directed by Richard Donner, who'd go on to direct Superman and Lethal Weapon.)

I'd been developing business opportunities in Europe, riding back-to-back six-figure years. The tech background and the travel collided into an idea for a short story. Simple premise: a man boards a plane, plugs his laptop into the airplane's network, and suddenly finds himself controlling the aircraft.

I went down to my home office to bang out the idea. At first it felt like pure fantasy, but my reality brain kicked in and started making it technological. Here's the catch: in 1996, there was no way to plug into an aircraft entertainment system. No wifi. No in-flight internet. No smartphones. Half the science fiction I needed hadn't happened yet.

The short story kept growing. Looking back, I think I spent four months writing a novel as a way of self-soothing through the uncertainty of the new venture — which, for the record, turned out fine.

One hundred thousand words later, I bought a book on finding a literary agent, sent out a stack of query letters, and spent real money at Kinko's getting two hundred pages photocopied. I came close — a good agent showed interest — but life intervened and the manuscript got shelved.

Cut to twenty-five years later. In my sixties, I had two friends my age who'd become hobby authors. One had built a sci-fi adventure series. The other was dusting off old screenplays from his days at Universal, using an AI engine to rewrite them as novels.

The photocopies from 1996 were long gone, but like everything else I've ever worked on, I still had the digital files. I reread The Fall of the TwinStar.

There's nothing like two decades of distance to give you perspective. It actually held up. It ran twenty thousand words too long, and the fax machines and rotary phones were artifacts of a world that no longer existed.

My friends' experience pushed me toward a rewrite. Editing your own work is like shooting your children — our son's safe, but I'm under no illusions about my manuscript. I dragged the technology into the present: cell phones, tablets, wireless everything.

Playing editor turned out to be a lot of fun. Fun enough that I started thinking about a sequel — the book that would eventually become Fiery.

But that's a different story.