Late summer of 2018, I was speaking with a co-worker, who’d published three books. He let me read the first, and he had his own superheroes in it. As I was finishing it, I talked for a while about superheroes, and wound up writing two pieces: one, “What’s Wrong With Superheroes and Supervillains”, which was published in the WSFA Journal. https://mrw.5-cent.us/?page_id=117 As I mention in it, I wrote a short story, what genuinely superpowered people would do. To demonstrate, I wrote a short story, “A Sunset, with Special Effects”.
While that story was bouncing from magazines, I was struck by the thought that I had a really interesting far future, and wanted to know more about it. I wrote what wound up as a novelette – it couldn’t be shorter, since I had so much ground to cover.
I submitted it to Amazing Stories. Five or six weeks later, I got two emails on morning: one was a standard rejection… and the other was a personal email from Ira Naylor, who was the editor at the time, telling me I needed to expand this, and tell more there, and that I should consider expanding it to a novelette.
I was mind-boggled, to say the least. I replied, noting that a novelette was too long a format for them, and got another email, the next days, agreeing it was too long.. but I did need to expand this, and by the way, I needed to be present at one scene, not merely reference it.
So it went from about eleven thousand+ words to about 25 or 26k.
I will note that the scene I needed to be present at is the harshest scene in the novel… but I’ve had several people agree that it had to be there, it’s part of the reaction to discovering that everyone, everything, your entire universe, is dust in the wind.
Another thing I have is that I hate cardboard villains, the bad guys who twirl their mustaches, and do bad, for no reason other than to do bad.
So, having dealt with the Unpleasant People, as I referred to them, the question is why the people in that society put up with it. To answer that, I started a story around someone who lived in that society.
When that went over 30k words, I said the hell with it, it was clearly a novel, and wrote another 45k words that tied it all together. The original short, A Sunset, etc, is part of the novel.
And that’s 11,000 Years. I will add one brag: my old friend, who some of you know as Dr. Seti (Paul Schuch), told me at Boskone that he hadn’t found any scientific errors in it, which sent me over the roof.