Fruit-salad trees – producing a number of different kinds of fruit off one tree are quite common these days. So are fruit-salad authors… Okay, yes I know I resemble that remark. Perhaps the others are more in the sense that one tree produces a lot of varieties of fruit, than the way you might apply it to me. I’ve been trying to widen the variety I can carry in my orchard – I have lots of land but enclosing it and keeping the local wildlife from eating the fruit and destroying the trees, is expensive and challenging. I have around 30 trees in the open enclosure, and more the glass-house, but we’re sitting on the practical limit without starting a new enclosure.
The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, I get bored with an unremitting diet of vast quantities of one kind of anything. Secondly, well, the key to self-sufficiency is variety, because, trust me on this, at least when you have lots of things growing, and the inevitable plague of bugs or mice or disease… you still have a chance something will come good. Even zucchini fail sometimes. This is certainly true of my writing. I might LOVE a specific book and universe, while I am busy with it – but after 3-6 months of LIVING in that universe, thinking it, dreaming it at night, getting into trouble for calling my wife by the heroine’s name… I need something else. And, well, scattershot writing – I find many of my readers will follow me into other genres and types of book. They have their favorite, but there is always a chance that this year, that type will fail or succeed wildly. I could probably make more money sticking to my last, but it is hard to write yet another great HEIRS OF ALEXANDRIA book having just finished a 270K volume.
I plant a lot of new trees… um, start novels in new universes. But there really is a substantial demand for more books set in some of my existing universes, and, well, for me to write them in other people’s universes. I could probably sell another Karres book tomorrow. I have been asked for more RBV, more CHANGELING’S ISLAND, more CLOUDCASTLES etc. I’ve written a couple of stories in other people’s universes too, 1632, and John Ringo’s BLACK TIDE RISING. It’s a feature of our genre. And every time is rather like grafting a new branch onto an existing tree.
There’s the plus in that the existing tree (or series or universe) is strong and established. But… just like grafting on a different scion – that is no guarantee it will ‘take’. Making a union between the old and new actually is damned hard. You have to match your scion very closely. The fruit it might produce can be somewhat different, but let’s face it, grafting apple varieties works – when you try and graft a cherry to an apple… well, it’s like putting romantic high fantasy onto noir sf… it may occasionally work, who knows, but it isn’t likely.
So: bits of advice. Unless you can deeply immerse yourself in the universe you’re going to contribute to, and you can write something at least broadly within that sub-genre type… don’t. That was why – despite invitation, I only wrote the two 1632 stories – early on. The entire universe got too big and complex to be worth my investing the huge amount of time studying it well enough to write in it would take. I must admit to being very unsure I COULD write the ‘BLACK TIDE’ type of near-future stories, but took it as a challenge – and carefully chose my settings so while I was in the same universe I was not interlocking much with other stories. If it hadn’t come out well enough, I wouldn’t have submitted it – but I liked it, and it seems the editors did too.
Karres… well, I have seldom put as much effort into someone else’s universe-type (GEORGINA was also ‘fanfic’) as i did for that. I reread ALL of the author’s work, and read nothing else while I was writing those. I made copious notes on the universe and the language, and had a large ‘bible’ I worked off. I even bothered to try and structure my sentences the same way and restricted my vocabulary and dialogue to words Schmitz used. And I still got ‘nothing like’ from the hard-core — although the books sold well, and continue to sell.
We can bear many kinds of fruit. Some strange fruit.
I put the Prometheus Logo on the cover – Is this OK, guys?
Mad Genius Club 
23 responses to “Grafting”
One thing about planting lots of novels – you don’t run out of space, the way you will with an orchard!
I’m exploring espalier and fan training for my fruit trees, living as we do on a small town lot.
My stories tend to want their own settings. . . .
There is such a thing as being too diverse, friend Dave. Why, I knew one well established SF author who in what was obviously a fit of demonic possession decided to write a Regency Romance. Did it under a pseudonym of course, but what was he thinking?
heh. Thinking? He can’t do that.
But it was a damn fine Regency novel!
Oh most certainly. My involvement was a beta read and copy edit. A thoroughly enjoyable experience. I just had to take the opportunity to tweak brother Dave as is my wont, knowing full well he would take it as the intended jest it was.
FWIW, I know your name and knew you were joking. It’s just that I feel strongly that is IS a damn fine Regency novel …
Totally in agreement with your assessment. Goes to show just how talented Dave really is. And tickled to death over his being recognized with the Prometheus Award as well.
I’m just contemplating what sort of apocalyptic event would cause zucchini to fail.
(A decade or so ago, I made the mistake of planting three zucchini plants, because my wife loved zucchini, and because I didn’t expect all of them to survive. Spoiler: she no longer lives zucchini. And I played a lot of “ding dong ditch” With the local homeless mission. Never got quite desperate enough to start shoving them in unlocked cars, but…)
I’ve had zucc die on me. Too little water. Also, had them get infested with squash beetles, and barely produce anything.
My philosophy is: plant 3,, thin to 1 healthy one. Thinning is important, unless I have freezer space.
Well, last year they just ‘failed to thrive’ We had about 7 Zucchini off one plant and about about five off the other.
Tomatoes were also a dud – very few – cold wet year. Potatoes and Alliums thrived as did my carrots, broccolli and spinach.
I can’t grow zucchini. I’ve tried in three states. It’s a no-go.
I can grow cucumbers. We have a fridge drawer full, and I’m thinking of what the heck I can do with them besides salad and sandwiches. AND we have more coming. Tomatoes have reached the level of attack of the killer tomatoes. I’m not watering them. I’m no longer spraying for bugs. They keep growing and ripening, and every other day I have a bumper harvest.
The three zucchs looked lovely and thriving, then died. Inexplicably. I really, truly have no idea why.
I think younger son secretly sprays them with round up, because he hates zucchini. But he no longer lives with us. So, what gives?
Cucumbers = pickles.
Fruit salad lives, I love it!
Re: your cover update — if that is an actual “on the shelves” change (vs just for this blog), and if it were me (which it isn’t), I would move the Author name block a little bit up, and put a more modest (but still quite visible) rectangle below that.
My reasoning is: It’s a perfectly legitimate brag and of importance to some people who have never heard of you, but it’s no more than we can expect from “Dave Freer….” (Might even skip “Author of Stardogs” for this one.)
The retail search process might include “Prometheus Award”, but that should be in the text description. The accident of a random viewer seeing the cover (ad, scroll-by) means it should be quite legible at that size, but it speaks to the quality of all of your writing (in principle). Making it huge in the way above is more about your astonishment, than maximal functionality.
Just my 2 bits… 🙂
I would prefer smaller BUT The issue is as a thumbnail it becomes illegible any smaller.
Dave, I have a “Golden seal” type thing for the Prometheus win I’ll GLADLY share with you. Please look at the Amazon cover of Darkship thieves. It was approved by the society way back when.
On the writing in different genres, I hear you. I tend to use the cheesy “the heart wants what it wants” line to describe that phenomenon. In terms of writing in other people’s universes, I have committed fanfic at different times, mostly short vignettes, but I haven’t tried writing in other universes for money/recognition since the days when I was one of however many billion Trekkies trying to get my foot in the door through the annual Strange New Worlds contest.
My hat is off to anyone who can write in other people’s universes on a regular basis, precisely because of the level of research and loyalty to the subject matter needed. I get annoyed just trying to determine whether that guy in that movie I am sporadically fanficcing is driving a phaeton or a gig. In my published works, I borrow characters and concepts pretty freely from books and movie/TV I consume, but by the time I’ve tweaked them to taste and mish-mooshed them up with other stuff I like, the serial numbers are pretty thoroughly gone.
I have disguised fragments of adolescent Star Trek internal fanfic in my second fantasy series. No, I am not saying where or what… 🙂
(Star Trek came out when I was in 8th grade. It more than made up for the fact that I was home on Friday nights without dates.)
Heh, you’re in good company, Lois McMaster Bujold apparently did that too in Barrayar or one of her other early books.
Ahem. More Reverend Joy? Who stole the communion wine? Or a riff on Agatha Christie, with ‘poison pen’ letters in the town?
The trouble with more Reverend Joy is, that most of the characters are accounted for. That’s to say that we know what Donald and Cam have to do … and Lindsey and Jeff … and Madelyn and Arthur, and watching them do it isn’t nearly as compelling as watching them realize that that IS what they have to do.
However, in considering the characters… I think a story could come from Tom’s daughter. She’s pretty wide open in terms of what we know, but did just make a big change in her life (quitting university). And some bureaucracy could creep in and then get destroyed … Just a little late dream …
I don’t really want more Schmitz in Karres (he started it, and you did good with it), I just want more Karres. Which at this point means I want more Dave Freer.