[CT] Re: When will the American publishers wake up?

[Daniel Moran]

Mostly just time. 4-1/2 years ago I got involved with Amy Stout -- then 
spent the next 4 years fighting a never-ending custody battle against her 
ex-husband, Alan Rodgers. (Which is quite a story -- I've got a couple 
hundred pages of source documents for an essay, possibly a book, about it. 
I used to be friends with Alan & Amy when they were married; after she left 
him Alan's first step was to start telling people that I was a child 
molester. After that he got really nasty. I'm dead serious about the essay 
at least -- Amy and I are considering whether to write a book together 
about the entire experience, but even if that doesn't happen, I'll publish 
the essay at some point as a free .pdf file.)  This is a man who's 
threatened to murder Amy, his own children, his girlfriend's daughter ... 
claims he can't recall having put his hands around Amy's neck and choking 
her, can't even recall having told Bruce Holland Rodgers about this 
incident -- but I've got Holland Rodgers's testimony about this one under 
oath, got testimony from the girlfriend about his attempts to blackmail her 
when she left him -- these are people who under oath described themselves 
as Alan's friends; you can imagine what I think of the guy. He either 
perjured himself or had a breakdown about the suicide watch he was on after 
Amy left him -- claimed under oath not to recall that either, but again 
Bruce Holland Rodgers testified under oath about it, so that one's nailed 
down with sworn testimony.

So ... four long years of that. The last 6 months have been fairly quiet, 
but I have no idea how long that's going to last; we may be back in court 
at any time.

This has distracted from the writing. Lord November was in a 
mostly-complete state most of a decade ago; I haven't touched it in the 
years since then. I hope to see it in print not long after AI War, however. 
(There was an interesting stretch some time ago when I was writing both AI 
War and Lord November at the same time -- sometimes on the same 
day.)  Could I have jumped ahead? Sure, though the first little stretch of 
Lord November, which is online, already tells people most of what happened 
between 2080 & the late 2600s. But mostly it's just been lack of time -- 
supporting a family of (now) 7 people, fighting court battles, trying to 
find time to write.

At 03:25 PM 5/31/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>Here's the goofy question:
>
>Aside from the obvious situation with having to write the darn things...
>
>Is there a particular reason why you haven't skipped to some other portion
>of the CT cycle (say a book or few after Lord November so as to avoid
>copyright issues and far enough along so that people don't feel like they've
>missed anything) and 'started over' from there?
>
>David
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: continuing-time-admin@ralf.org
> > [mailto:continuing-time-admin@ralf.org]On Behalf Of Daniel Moran
> > Sent: Friday, May 31, 2002 3:14 PM
> > To: continuing-time@ralf.org
> > Subject: Re: [CT] Re: When will the American publishers wake up?
> >
> >
> > At 11:37 AM 5/31/2002 -0700, you wrote:
> > >There is a near-zero probability that Bantam will ever bring out the
> > >continuing-time series (or republish the earlier books, which is a
> > >pity because I really liked the Jim Burns covers of tAB & tLR, and I
> > >think Bantam still holds the rights to the art).
> >
> > Near-zero pretty much covers it. I've had two different passes in
> > the last
> > 6 ? years with them where I offered to deliver the book if they'd
> > commit to
> > some schedule of advertising and republication of the earlier
> > works. Their
> > response both times was they'd look at the mss. first, and then
> > decide how
> > to handle it. I don't even find this a particularly unreasonable position
> > on their part, but given how they hosed the publication of Last
> > Dancer, I'm
> > unwilling to deliver that mss. to them without a commitment up
> > front as to
> > how it will be handled.
> >
> > Now they can't republish the earlier works; they've been republished. And
> > I'm uninterested in another one-off paperback from Bantam.
>
>
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