Old ideas

A reader named Jonathan (a different Jonathan than me) asks:

“I had a question. Do you keep copies of various drafts rough darfts and stages your work has gone through? And if you do, how many of the discarded ideas are recycled into later books?”

Prior to 2011, I did that a lot. Back then there was no self-publishing, so if I wrote something and I was unable to sell it anywhere, I would sometimes rework it into a new form and try to sell it somewhere else. This is why the first few books of DEMONSOULED and THE GHOSTS have some concepts that carry over between each other. I would write a book, fail to place it with a traditional publisher, and think “we’ll, let’s recycle this concept elsewhere.”

After 2011, I stopped doing that entirely, because almost everything I wrote went into a self-published book. So there were no discarded ideas left to recycle.

These days, I have more ideas than I have time to turn into books. Like, I’ll be walking along and I’ll see something, and the idea for an entire nine book series pops into my head. Do I have time to write another nine book series right now? Not really! 🙂

But, honestly, ideas matter much less than their implementation. A good example of this is the Apple iPod and the Microsoft Zune. Neither Apple nor Microsoft had the original idea for a digital music player, but they both tried to implement that idea.

How did the implementation work out? You can still buy the iPod Touch from Apple, but these days Microsoft Zune is mostly known as the punchline of a joke in one of the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY movies.

-JM