Rewriting Dark Matters

Three years ago my SF novella “Dark Matters” saw the light of day. The more time passed, the less I was happy with the current version of the story. My biggest concern was that I have learned a hell of a lot about writing the past three years (I think and hope) and I was itching to revise the manuscript.

During Chicon 7, I discussed things with the publisher of Dark Matters.

In its current form the piece has 29,000 words. The plan now is to beef it up to somewhere between 40,000 and 45,000 words.

How do you do a thing like that? How do you add a “fourth third” to the story so to say? In my opinion, you can only do this by adding new material instead of doctoring around with the old.

The basic idea of the story is that the dark matter on the planet lets you see the worst thing that ever happened to you in your life (for the Captain it’s what happened on his space ship, the Luminous) and by reliving it, lets you cope with it.

So I got the idea to add the worst things that happened to the four Gao crew members. The only thing we know from the original “Dark Matters” is that Neville’s wife drowned and that Lucile sees the accident that brought the Gao to the dark matter planet. It’s nowhere mentioned what Darak and Terry see.

I have now written the first drafts of the worst things that happened to Neville, Terry, Darak and Lucile in third person (since the Captain cannot know them) and will insert those passages into the original narrative.

I don’t know why it surprises me so, because it’s sort of in the nature of “the worst thing that happened to you in your life”, but nevertheless it amazes me how sad and dark and even gritty and horror-like this has become. I am oddly amazed at how wicked it is what my fingers are typing. Subconscious taking over and stress release from work? I guess that plays its part. I am very excited and greatly fascinated and immensely enjoy this rewrite. The story and the characters are taking over and develop a life of their own and I sit there in amazement and think: awesome!

I have no clue whether the publisher will go along with the different direction the story is taking now and I could understand it if he didn’t. Our deal is that if he likes it, he will re-publish the story under a different imprint and a different name. If he doesn’t like it, I am supposed to get the rights to the story back. In that case I will put it out myself via CreateSpace one day. One way or the other, I will probably market the rewrite as a dark SF or even horror SF piece instead of plain SF. One thing is for sure, I highly enjoy this rewrite and I’ll try to make that show on the page!