JANE0904'S BLOG
Prospero - done and dusted
Thursday, December 18, 2008 1:12 PM
SPOILER ALERT!So there is it. Prospero’s Legacy . I can’t believe I’ve finished it! Coming in at forty chapters, and over 124,000 words, it is by far the longest story I’ve ever written. In fact, two and a half times as long.
I first had the basic idea two years ago, a simple plot revolving around children being taken from an Alliance facility and used by an Independent faction. It was going to be set on a moon called Prospero, tying up (I thought) quite nicely with Miranda, and River was going to be kidnapped and forced to lead them.
That story got recycled into something else (not particularly recognisable), but I liked the idea of someone having been developed by the Alliance getting kidnapped. I wrote a single sheet, which I actually incorporated into the end of Hope , way back in July 2007, about Mara Tam in a chair, being watched by two scientists as she had nightmares. I used the name Mara because I’d already had Simon use that as an alias, several months earlier. See, it all ties together …
Anyway, it grew. Evolved. I’d drop breadcrumbs, mention the New Browncoats, have Simon’s old mentor Andrew Brooks poisoned by an unnamed source, then becoming more specific, with talk of RePax (including the reappearance of our old friend Niska in Eden ), Anti-Pax, and … so on. All the while I was thinking about the final outline of the major arc I was working towards, and getting more and more scared! I began to wonder if I could ever do it justice, and realised I had thrown so many breadcrumbs it was almost an entire bakery. Something had to be done.
I sat down, drew a web, and tried to draw all the different elements I’d already hinted at into a coherent story. I decided I had to have a sort of prequel, because apart from having Mal being semi-naked and tortured, I also needed to have someone give him some information, and decided that should be Niska. I always envisaged that evil old man coming back from being a Reaver, and wanted it to be part of the over-arching plot. And Mal had to be able to finally deal with Niska once and for all. So Volcano’s Edge was born. And Dillon, Breed and Alex decided to make an entrance, which meant they also wanted to be in at the denouement, so now I had other characters to write for …
Terror is not too strong a word for how I felt as I started to write snippets while writing other stories too. That’s how I tend to write – if I envisage a scene from maybe five chapters ahead, I put it down. It might change over time, might be dumped entirely, but then at least I only have to write the connecting bits.
Oddly enough, the scene at the end of part thirty-nine, where Mal and Zoe look out over Serenity Valley from the ridge where they had held out at the end of the war, was written virtually first. The climax to the story was always going to take place on Hera – it was just the getting there that changed.
I have to admit, though, having Regan and Gabriel involved was almost an afterthought. I had always felt that they were blinkered, but not complicit in River’s Academy experience, and wanted to give them a chance to make things right. Perhaps it was a cliché to have Gabriel die in saving Simon, and originally I wrote it that they never got to say goodbye (as Joss did with Wash), but I changed my mind. What’s wrong with a good old cliché once in a while?
Chiang Goff, Emil Quintana, Vic Ramsey … they all were necessary characters to pull the story forward. But you have no idea how much I agonised over whether to have it be Mal on board Columbine when she was boarded by the Alliance, or Dillon, whether Bennett should just be an Independent sympathiser or have him – as I did in the end – be an old friend. Well, almost. I used that to tie up with Freya’s past. You might have guessed that I like doing that – using little hints to refer back to previous stories. I see my Maya tales as one continuous arc, and try to keep the timeline and histories accurate within it. Sometimes I have to reread my tales myself, jus
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