Nuking Disney(planet)
Raptors, Westworld, terrorists, Tom Clancy, and Rainbow Six.
I occurred to me that someone asked me a question, and I never answered it. Literally, never. And it was about my books. I didn’t answer because it was a question on Facebook, and my reply would be a freaking blog article…
Oh wait, I have one of those.
The question was, “How did you turn a thirty page short story into a Tuscany Bay Books novel?”
Come with me now back to 1998. I was writing what would become White Ops—which, you may recall, started as Babylon 5 fanfiction.1 Writing all this was supposed to just get random ideas out of my head. It was not supposed to spiral into 4,000 pages, six novels, and a compulsion with writing.
I had gotten the first two books out of the way, finally, and it covered the events of the TV series. And I kept going. I started plowing into what came next.
My father made an offhand comment about “Why not a terrorist takeover of Disneyplanet?”
That short story—and at that time, everything in the novels was a short story—was about thirty pages long. My characters arrived. They unpacked. The terrorists were already in place in security, so they quietly took the planet hostage during the night. My heroes figure it out and kill everybody.
That was, again, 30 pages … maybe sixty.2 Everyone was dead. The end.
Funny enough, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six came out that August. One of the hostage instances was … a terrorist attack at EuroDisney (Spain, if I recall correctly.) So, timing.
I moved on from the fan fiction, wrote other novels. I went back, tinkered some more. I must have I think I had written about twenty or thirty novels before I went back the for The Final Edit.
By then, most of my books ran entirely on having smart villains, who had a lot of resources and manpower.
And in the original short…
Hey! I developed my own lore during this rewrite. I need to make this make sense.
Why are my heroes within walking distance of the villains? We have a planet to work with. Put them on the other end of the planet. Getting there is now half the fun.
I basically assumed everyone had an idea of what Disney looked like. I gave minimal descriptions of what the Planet looked like. So description? What description?
If getting there is half the fun, I have to set up some threats.
Oh, wait, I can’t just data dump description. I have eight characters, let them have fun for a day, that way I can outline some threats and have the gun on the wall in act one.
Like the killer animatronics (Why, yes, I grew up watching the Yul Brenner Westworld, why do you ask?).
Or Cretaceous World, with the genetically reengineered dinosaurs—oh, who cares if they’re all from three different eras, no one is going to notice.
Most planets are heavy on the water… there was a giant squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, right? And there were giant sharks, right?3
That’s the ocean. But we have animatronic pirates, don’t we?
Westworld was far too easy. Surely we can up the ante.
This is all too easy. Let’s detail the massive, world ending threat.
This is too easy. Let’s make the threat harder to disarm.
This is still way too easy. Let’s go Full John Ringo! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA
This is too simple. Here are the terrorists. Here are my heroes. I’m going to throw in a wild card. And I’m going to address the military response with orbitals overhead.
Wait, I had personal backstory for one of my heroes with the villain. I should probably go into emotional splash damage.
Oh, yeah, MAKE IT NOT DISNEY, YOU IDIOT, YOU DON’T WANT TO GET SUED.
So, yeah. I had some expansion. I had a whole world to play with and I didn’t play with it. For some reason,4 I was way too gentle on my toys. But I was the writer, and I can break my toys if I wanted.
Jim Butcher likes to say that he has no original ideas, he just steals from a lot of places—like Harry Dresden is “just” a magical Jim Rockford or Spenser. If that’s the case, White Ops 3: Main Street DOA is some Rainbow 6, Westworld, Jurassic Park, Pirates of the Caribbean, Meg, and some John Wick, just for fun.
As the saying goes: to steal from one source is plagiarism, to steal from many sources is called “research.”
So, how do you expand a short story into a full novel? A little effort, really.
Again, feel free to ask me anything in the comments. If you get an email, you can ping me through the comment button at the top.
And please, feel free to buy a book, or leave a book review. Either would be greatly appreciated.
Specifically, Haganah representative Feivel Polkes, as well as some Kibbutzim on the ground in Israel.
And no, I didn’t know what fan fiction was back then.
At the time, I was 16, and didn’t know that manuscripts should be double-spaced, in 12 point font. Not ten.
Funny enough, I read Steve Alten’s Meg when it came out in 1997, and it didn’t occur to me to use it here until a much later draft.
Probably because I was 16.
That was a fun one!