Never Throw Anything Away
Joe
Bonadonna
Not long ago a friend remarked that I’m very
prolific, citing that since 2011 I’ve published 6 novels and 7 short stories,
with two more stories and another novel on the way. I don’t know. Is that being
prolific? I don’t consider myself to be prolific. I know people who publish 2
or 3 novels a year. I can’t even begin to tell you how long it took me to write
Mad Shadows: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the
Dowser. But I can say that it took me 3 years to write the sequel, Mad Shadows II: Dorgo the Dowser and The
Order of the Serpent, and three or so years to write my forthcoming novel, The MechMen of Canis-9. Hell, it took me
6 months one time just to write a 25-K word novella. Prolific? Not really. But
I’ll tell you a secret.
Never throw anything away.
I started writing in 1973, and I wrote a short story
each month for over a year. Every one of them got rejected for various reasons.
In retrospect, they were pretty awful. But I hung onto them anyway and filed
them away. I knew there was a seed or a spark in each of them that could evolve
into something else, something different and better, as time went on.
The only story I wrote and tossed into the trash, other than things I’d written
in grade school and high school, was the original version of Mad Shadows. This was not the story that
starred Dorgo the Dowser. No, this was an entirely different tale, with
different characters and a totally different plot. Around 1977 or I submitted it
to a number of professional magazines, such as Analog, Fantastic, and The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Everyone rejected it: old-hat; just
another sword and sorcery tale; all plot based around cardboard characters. Mind
you, for all the criticisms there were also helpful tips, suggestions, and
plenty of encouragement to keep trying. Now, I didn’t throw the manuscript away
out of anger and disappointment . . . I
tossed it into the trash because I rewrote it over and over again, changing the
plot, changing the “McGuffin,” and finally settled on Dorgo as the main
character.
For over ten years I also labored over a 1000-page
fantasy epic: Courier font, 12 characters per inch. That’s about 300 words per
page, I think. Finally, I knew it was too unwieldly for my meager talent, too
unmanageable; the damn thing had become my own Frankenstein’s monster. I then moved
on to trying my hand at writing screenplays, which was a great learning
experience I recommend every writer try. But I never threw away that 1000-page
monstrosity. Nope. I mined that sucker as if I was mining for gold. Two long
chapters eventually evolved into the novellas, In the Vale of the Black Diamond and Blood on the Moon, both of which appear in Mad Shadows 1. One other story I’d written during that year-long
writing binge also ended up in MS 1: The
Man Who Loved Puppets. Another later appeared in Mad Shadows II: The Girl Who Loved Ghouls. Another story
became The Blood of the Lion, which
was published in Griots II: Sisters of
the Spear, and one more turned into The
Dragon’s Horde, for Janet Morris’
Heroika I: Dragon Eaters. Pieces and parts from various unfinished projects
ended up as chapters in Dave Smith’s and my sword and sorcery pirate novel, Waters of Darkness.
As for the screenplays I wrote? I penned five during
a 5-year period?
My space opera, Star
Trooper Doon became the novel Three
Against The Stars. Then I turned my silly satire, Sinbad’s Summer Vacation into the more serious and dramatic novella,
Sinbad and The Golden Fleece, which
was also published in Sinbad: The New
Voyages #4. Another screenplay became the Dorgo the Dowser novella, The Order of the Serpent, which is part
three of Mad Shadows II. A fourth
screenplay turned into the three-year project, The MechMen of Canis-9, and another unpublished novel, The Last Warlock, not only was mined for
MechMen, but for a number of other stories, as well.
As for the fifth
screenplay . . . well, that’s a somewhat interesting story.
In 1997, years before the zombie craze exploded like
a nuke, I wrote a screenplay called Twilight
of the Dead. Naïve me . . . I intended it to be a sequel to the late George
Romero’s third “living dead” film, Day of
the Dead. I even managed to get in touch with Romero’s agent, who kindly
replied that Romero already had a number of films on the drawing board. The
agent told me that, as Romero holds no copyright over the use of zombies, and
as long as I didn’t use any of his characters or referenced any of his films, I
should shop the script around because he and Romero believed a “zombie boom”
was about to break big. So I shopped it around, as I did with all my scripts,
but nothing happened. Later, I read that Romero was thinking of calling his
fourth flesh-eating epic Twilight of the
Dead. So I changed my title to Children
of the Grave, taking it from an old Black Sabbath song. (Since then there
have been one film and at least one novel with that same title.) Someday, hopefully,
if I can come up with a good hook, something not yet done, I’ll turn my zombie
script into a novel, too.
So what has all this to do with anything?
Nothing. Everything, as Saladin (Ghassan Massoud)
says to Balian de Ibelin (Orlando Bloom) in Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, The Kingdom of Heaven.
My point is — my novels, short stories and many of
my novellas might never have been written, had I not mined my “writing past”
for the sake of my writing future. And that 1000-page, heroic fantasy magnum
opus? It will be mined again and again for material until there’s nothing left
of it. In fact, about 25-K words of it, perhaps more have already been used for
Mad Shadows III: Dorgo and The Heroes of
Echo Gate. Only a few Dorgo the Dowser tales, Erika M Szabo’s and my
2-volume Creepy Hollow Adventures,
and the stories I write for Janet Morris’ Heroes
in Hell series have been written from scratch.
What I’m saying is — your words are precious. They
come from your heart and soul, from the very core of your being. They’re born
of your blood, sweat and tears. Save everything you write. Store it away for
the future. While today’s words may not glitter right now, tomorrow they just
might turn out to be gold. So don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
Oh, how I wish I had saved that very first version
of the Mad Shadows. That’s why now I
never throw anything away.
#heroicfantasy
#swordandsorcery #spaceopera #swordandplanet #horror
#supernatural #newpulpadventure #children’sbooks
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