August 19th, 2001

August 19, 2001

Posted at 6:51 PM by Jack Chalker

I’m slowly switching the site over to Dreamweaver and some other Macromedia utilities, so bear with me if some things lookfunny for a while. Apologies for not updating until now, but, the fact is, there’s almost nothing to report as yet. I’m about to set off for the WorlScience Fiction Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, about 110 miles from my house, via, of course, Moscow, Idaho for Moscon. Still no finished Kaspar’s Box but I’m continuing to work on it, even on the road.

 

     For those folks who continue to email me, mostly with nice comments, it might be time for a recap (you old timers know this already). (1) The publisher of the first five Dancing Gods books refused to do the sixth. They have since discontinued virtually all my books with them, so it’s unlikely we’ll see any more from Del Rey until the current editorial regime there changes, at least. Nobody else is interested in the sixth book because they didn’t control the first five, and they aren’t convinced that there are enough folks out there to justify reissuing the first five (we even had problems talking Baen into doing the first five Well World books, so you can see how tough this is). I can’t afford to write for nothing. I do this for a living and both I and my wife and kids like to eat and have the mortgage paid and so on. I’d love to do it, it’s been outlined for years and was intended to follow Horrors by no more than a year, but the book business changed suddenly and dramatically between titles. (2) I’m not “failing to permit” folks to make movie and TV versions of my works. I’d be delighted to cash the checks and get the publicity for new novels. Nobody out there is interested, nobody has made an offer. That’s how it works in Hollywood. I have exactly one potential TV project right now, it’s been ongoing for years with no money or firm deal yet, and who knows? Lots of stuff went right to the deal-making stage and then fell through. You almost always don’t even know why. It just stops. I have a standing offer to talk nicely with any producer interested in any of my works. (3) I now have a neat idea for a Northern Hemisphere Well World saga and the means to do it. Whether it ever gets done will depend on how well the reissues sell. (4) So far the various electronic versions of my work including the one formal ebook have failed to generate sales or interest by readers in even three figures. My predictions of ebooks as the future of novels (I don’t believe it for a moment) are being borne out by experience. Print on Demand is a possibility for some titles that have unlikely futures.

     For the geek part of the readership, I just upgraded the computer to a 1 gig Pentium, still am writing in Framemaker 6, and then translating down to rtf for Baen. I’ve also stopped lugging around a laptop, but thanks to the amazing Targus Folding Keyboard I’m able to write on the road on my Handspring Visor Prism handheld device. It’s been the handiest thing, particularly for conventions, I’ve ever gotten.

     Okay, so I’m off to Moscow and then Philadelphia, writing all the way. See many of you there, I hope, and you others online. Next update, barring major news, when I finish Kaspar. Until then, thanks for the support, recommend my books to your friends, and keep reading!


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