The Clone Alliance
Page 35
But I had no intention of fighting or of rejoining the Marines. The U.A. had betrayed me too many times. Yes, I would die, too; but at least I would not die protecting a government that had tricked me and left me to die. One thing seemed certain, we were all going to die.
Yet deep inside I knew I was just fooling myself. Sooner or later, I would get sucked in again. After all, I was a military clone. Like it or not, I was government property, and the final battle was coming.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
My efforts to write this book were sabotaged!
A company called VG Pocket released a handheld game system called Caplet, with really excellent versions of the arcade classics Burger Time and Bust a Move. You may not have guessed, but I am an avid video game addict. When a Caplet landed on my desk, I often found myself struggling to reach the elusive fifth level of Burger Time when I should have been writing.
Caplet pried its way into my life sometime in August 2006, ten weeks before a finished manuscript was due to my publisher. That act of Caplet sabotage came toward the end of a rather rushed chronology that began on May 31, when I got a call from my agent, Richard Curtis, letting me know that he had sold Ace Books two more books in the Wayson Harris series.
Ace asked for nothing more than titles and story lines in May, but drafts of the books were due in October and April. At the time that Richard called, I was working on a book from an unsold series of young adult books. Switching gears in midbook was not easy.
At first the words for this book came slowly. I try to write two thousand words per day. As I began this project, I had days in which I wrote seven hundred words and days in which I wrote five hundred. Thus, while I expected to finish the first draft before August, I did not finish until September 13. That left me roughly fifty days to finish and proof a story that would clearly need a lot of polish—which would not have been much of a problem in a Caplet-free world.
These are the people who helped me with that job. My parents read The Clone Alliance as I went along in weekly installments. My dad, an Analog fan from the first days of the magazine, was particularly helpful.
Once I finished that first draft, I ran copies of that very rough draft to Mark Adams and John Thorpe for suggestions on improving the story line. John was diplomatic about his reservations, Mark was not. The alarms go off when a soft-spoken friend like Mark Adams says he is afraid to send you his comments because he does not want to endanger your friendship. Mark, friends don’t let friends go out in public with their pants down. Thank you, Mark, and thank you, John; many of your suggestions have been added.
I started the third draft of this book before finishing the second—mostly because the biggest problems were in the first half of the book. Once things seemed almost presentable, my wife gave this book its first proofing. With the spelling and punctuation in hand, I finished my half of this project by handing the book off to Rachel Johnson, a family friend who has a great eye for spelling, punctuation, and story suggestions. You may have noticed the dedication—Rachel Johnson is that “Rachel.” Dustin and Dillan are her husband and son.
The second half of this project happened at Ace, where an editor named Anne Sowards cut and cleaned my work. She and her team are the final eyes. She tells me to cut scenes to make the pace faster or to add to scenes to get the point across.
One point I did not spell out adequately in prior novels was why Harris came out so different than the Liberators before him. I could not come up with a satisfactory explanation. Marcelo Sanjines (if the name sounds familiar, it is because Father David Sanjines, the priest in Rogue Clone, borrowed his family name from Marcelo) rescued me from this conundrum. One night while I was grappling with that question, I went out for hot chocolate with Marcelo and he said, “Harris is so different than the other Liberators. Is that because he was raised in an orphanage?”
“Of course,” I said, acting as if I had planned that all along. Thanks, Marcelo. Next time we hit Starbucks, the hot chocolate is on me.
Back to my publisher…There are a lot of benefits that come from being published by Ace Books. The best perk, though, is having my covers created by Christian McGrath.
I wish to thank everyone I have mentioned for their help with this project, except VG Pocket. VG Pocket, your little handheld game system is diabolical in nature.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Novelist/journalist Steven L. Kent lives in Seattle, where he writes science fiction, historical fiction, young adult fiction, and articles about the video game industry that he hopes will not be proven fictitious. For more about Kent, visit his official website www.SadSamsPalace.com.