Filed Away

Chapter 11 of Methuselah’s Daughter is up at 3500years.com. This marks the beginning of Part Two of the book, subtitled Destiny’s Road as a quiet tribute to Larry Niven, a favorite author of mine. Part One was subtitled Where The Sidewalk Ends in honor of Shel Sliverstien. The subtitles were chosen with care to attempt to reflect the tone and character of the respective parts of the book (there are four, all told).

Part Two is where the book actually becomes good for me. Part One was all about introducing Zsallia and the interviewer and setting up the series of events where he starts to believe she may actually be what she says she is. During the writing of Part One Dean and I weren’t sure exactly what form the book would take. We both had ideas, but those ideas weren’t in agreement. Dean’s thought was to simply take the old BlogSpot weblog and edit it together as a sort of series of tales she would recount to the interviewer from her hospital bed. My desire was to get her out of that hospital scene as quickly as we could and get her back on her feet, then use the old blog as a rough outline for stories about her past. Obviously, my viewpoint won out, but hints of the old plan are evident in Part One.

The story of Att and Attuz (Chapter 11 is just the opening to that tale) was essentially Dean’s creation- it was inspired by a short blog entry titled Scent of Fate written very early in the life of the blog. I was still feeling out Zsallia’s voice at that time so her presentation was pretty slipshod compared to later entries. Dean felt there should be much more both before and after that incident and laid out his ideas, which were truly inspired. We were really clicking at that time and we cobbled together that entire sequence in about two weeks. To this day we point to that story as one of the most powerful ever told by Zsallia to that time.

One note regarding the BlogSpot site vs. 3500years.com:

We moved the entire site from BlogSpot to the new domain and initially intended to edit the new site to conform more closely to the story told in the novel. In the end we decided to leave it as it was; however, I did remove a couple of political posts from the new site as I wanted to tone down her political posture a bit. The old site is unedited and contains everything written up through December 2003. The new site picks up in April of 2004.