The Map Maker Blog

The Iterations of "The Glassy Planet"

2009-12-03T11:00:00Z

Although you would have never guessed it by how things started out, the third episode, "The Glassy Planet," went through the fewest revisions of the three first season episodes. It only went through eight drafts (whereas the first episode went through seventeen and the second went through twenty-five), but I started from scratch at the beginning of the first three drafts dumping everything from the drafts before.

I knew two things when I started out. I wanted to start in the middle of the action, and I wanted Captain Margay to be found at the beginning of the story. I didn't want the story to be a dragged out search for her.

First Draft - The story begins with the pirate ship crash landing on the Glassy Planet. It was pulled down by a space eddy or whirlpool. It seemed like a good way to start the story out in the middle of the action. If I had continued that storyline, it would have ended up that Margay's escape pod had been pulled down by the same space anomaly.

Second Draft - I dropped the crash landing and started from scratch. In this draft the story begins with Pirate Dark Star shouting, "Quick, guys! Come. I've found her!" It started in the middle of the action and with finding Margay. It fulfilled both of my goals starting out. But then everyone else started finding Margay too. Yes, in this draft, instead of Tonya, it was Margay who was duplicated by the magic mirror. There was even a lovesick Margay who was all over Rusty.

Third Draft - Still unsatisfied with the direction of the story, I started from scratch again. I had decided while writing the pirate scene in the first episode that Temple Pennywonk's treasure would be no more than a couple of baseball cards. And when I planned out the three episode arc, I decided there would be a mirror in the third episode that duplicated whoever looked into it. I didn't give much thought to the duplicating mirror beyond that. In the first two drafts, I just assumed that the mirror was a(n) (un)naturally occurring phenomenon on the Glassy Planet and unrelated to Temple Pennywonk.

When I was still unsatisfied with the storyline, I found myself thinking about the mirror. Where did it come from? Where did it get its powers from? Once I dreamed up a back story for the mirror, it seemed like the natural place to begin the story. Still dedicated to jumping right into the action, the first scene after the mirror's back story was Tonya looking into the mirror and her reflection jumping out at her.

Fourth Draft - Finally I had a foundation that I liked, so I didn't start from scratch this time. I thought it would be more fun for the reader if she were presented with several scenes of Tonya acting wildly out of character and came to the realization herself that Tonya had been duplicated somehow. I decided the best way to do this would be to have the characters split into search teams and then have a duplicate Tonya join each team. I wrote down the names of all the characters. Then I drew lines and arrows connecting them until I settled upon who would be teamed with whom. Then I started writing character traits the Tonya duplicate would most embody beside each team.

After deciding upon the teams, I wrote the rest of the story in a single sitting. The story went through a few more revisions, but the storyline remained relatively unchanged throughout the subsequent revisions.

Deleted Scene: Girls Have to Stick Together (1x02 - "Tongue Tied")

2009-12-01T11:00:00Z

In earlier drafts of "Tongue Tied," there was an additional scene after Captain Spectacular asked if he could come along too.

"Men. A ship full of them, and they have no idea where they're headed. How did Captain Margay ever put up with a ship full of men?"

"Just between you and me, Darling, I don't think Captain Margay is in a big hurry for her crew to find her." The Autopilot confided with Tonya in the seclusion of the curtain room.

"And now we have another man on board. They're all against me, you know. They hate the curtains I picked out."

"We girls just have to stick together. Okay?"

"Okay." affirmed Tonya.

I eventually dropped it because I thought it was more dramatic ending with Captain Spectacular's question. There's a place in the next episode, "The Glassy Planet," where the Autopilot tells Tonya, "I told you we girls have to stick together." I left that line in the third episode even though I cut this scene from the second. I thought the reader could infer from the line that Tonya and the Autopilot had been doing some girl-to-girl bonding on the ship.

Also in earlier drafts of "Tongue Tied," Captain Spectacular was named Captain Amazing. I thought Amazing was too generic and that Spectacular made him a little more distinct.

Alternate Scene: A Little Too Postmodern (1x02 - "Tongue Tied")

2009-11-29T11:00:00Z

The second episode of Map Makers, "Tongue Tied," went through the most revisions before it reached it's final form. It went through twenty-five drafts whereas I wrote seventeen drafts of the first episode and only eight of the third. Part of the problem is that I really didn't know where the story was going when I started. In one of the earlier drafts, the portion of the story formatted as a stage play and written in iambic pentameter stopped just short of them asking for directions and continued like this

[Author's note: While I respect William Shakespeare--or Christopher Marlow--whoever--for writing their plays in iambic pentameter, I find it quite impractical. Just look at the Iambians: they have been on Iambus for almost eight hundred years, and they are still living like they are in seventeenth century England. Have you ever tried drafting a comprehensive tax code in iambic pentameter let alone a physics textbook? My iambic pentameter is not much better than Bear's, so I confess that I copied Act II from a play I found marked only with the initials C.M. I seem to have lost the third act, so I will continue this story aboard the pirate ship.]

The glowing display of the built-in clock transitioned to 5:00 P.M. As Rusty stood up, Also ran to the door. When Rusty reached the door, it slid open. He followed Also to the galley to eat his supper in silence once again. In the galley, he pulled pickles and mayonnaise from the cooling unit. He was dumping both into the blender when he noticed several sheets of paper that appeared to have been dropped. He flipped a switch, and the blender whirred to life. He stooped to pick up the sheets. After flipping through them for a few seconds, his rushed out of the galley leaving the blender running.

Rusty burst onto the bridge. He ran straight to the control panel and fidgeted with several toggles until the ship’s course appeared on the screen. He stared at in contemplation for a few moments and then flipped through the stack of papers in his hand as if to double check something.

"Who is this C.M. guy anyway and where does he get off writing my character like a selfish jerk?"

The grate in the center of the bridge rattled loudly.

"I guess you're right, Johnson. That's exactly how I have been acting, but I'm going to change that. We've got to get everyone off of this planet by dark, and we do not have much time."

Rusty crawled into Reliable, and opened a hatch in Reliable's bridge. He gathered up body armor, various hand weapons, and grenades. With body armor on...

ACT III. Scene II.

...Rusty ran out the entrance of the pirate ship.

The idea was that Rusty had found the copy of "Tongue Tied"--the story he was a character in--I had lost. He read ahead and discovered "something bad" happened on Iambus after dark. I wasn't even sure what this "something bad" was going to be, but it was probably going to be something to do with space zombies or vampires. Then the story would have continued along the lines of a more or less conventional action plot. I think I was just tired of writing in iambic pentameter.

I really enjoyed the bits on interpersonal relationships about hanging curtains in the pirate ship and such that I had done earlier in the story. There is no shortage of action-packed pulp stories. I decided I wanted to explore the interpersonal relationships between the archetypes found in those action-packed pulps rather than follow the action. Once I decided this, the rest of the story flowed much easier.

Deleted Scene: Tiny Time Traveling (1x01 - "The Pluto Incident")

2009-11-27T17:58:55Z

I really liked this scene, and it was hard to part with it. I left it in until the fourteenth draft (of seventeen) of "The Pluto Incident." In the end, I couldn't justify it in terms of the story, and it pushed the story over the word limit.

This

Faster-than-light travel is not all that wonderful to look forward to. It leaves a sore feeling in your jaw that lasts several hours. It feels similar to biting down on a jawbreaker. If it was not for the fact that it would take millions of years to visit planets outside our solar system otherwise, it would have never been invented.

Creating an engine that could cross the galactic gaps in space proved to be one of the most difficult advances in the history of humanity. Compared to faster-than-light engines, time travel was easy to discover. It was discovered in the early twenty-third century.

Galactic gaps have length and width. They have a lot of length and width! Time is measured entirely different. Once scientists discovered how to measure time in the same way they measured distance, the rest was easy. The entirety of time up to the twenty-third century fit neatly on a quarter (yes, there is still money in the future).

The trick was shrinking a human so that he could fit onto time and slip into another time period. Dr. Simeon Mach, the German scientist credited with making time travel possible, created a shrink gun that could accomplish the task. After being shrunk, the average adult could cross whole millennia with a single step. Mach made adjustments to his gun and tried again. Then you could cross approximately one year with a step. At a brisk run, you could cross a millennium in just under five minutes.

Once you reached the year you wanted to visit, you would carefully slip through time and land on matter. Science fiction novels have predicted that careless time travelers could muck up the future. Since there is not much mucking you can do when you are less than a millimeter tall, there was never a problem with mucking.

Faster-than-light engines are not near as easy to explain, so I will not even try. It took Lord Drybel and a team of 118 British scientists sixteen years just to design the exhaust system.

became this in the final draft

Faster-than-light travel is not all that wonderful to look forward to. It leaves a sore feeling in your jaw that lasts several hours—similar to biting down on a jawbreaker. If it was not for the fact that it would take millions of years to visit planets outside our solar system otherwise, it would have never been invented. Creating an engine that could cross the galactic gaps of outer space proved to be one of the most difficult advances in the history of humanity. It took Lord Drybel and a team of 118 British scientists sixteen years just to design the exhaust system.

This deleted scene is significant because I'm developing a Map Makers spin-off titled The Misadventures of the Tiny Time Traveler (I'm developing it as an audio drama series). Yes, I'm developing a spin-off from a deleted scene. And yes, I'm still going to call it a spin-off of Map Makers even though the scene was cut from Map Makers.

Another fun fact: In the original draft of "The Pluto Incident" there was an additional character recruited as a map maker named Totter Oswald. She was a tomboyish character I dropped after the first draft. I hoped I could better develop the characters with a smaller group of main characters. I really like the name Totter, so I'll probably eventually use it for another character if not in Map Makers than in another story.

The First Season Now Online

2009-11-27T04:47:05Z

I want to introduce you to three friends of mine: Rusty Wallace, Tonya Jones, and Bear Williams. They are interstellar cartographers, but you can call them map makers.

As you may have guessed, they are fictional. I first met them on July 3, 2005. That was the day I penned the first 2,972 words of "The Pluto Incident," the first episode of Map Makers. Over the course of seventeen (!) drafts, I went on a marvelous adventure with them that included both a monster and space pirates. I finished the final draft on January 1, 2008. I want to share that adventure with you.

Map Makers is a short story serial reminscient of pulp fiction tales and classic space operas divided into seasons and episodes much like a TV series. The entire first season is available online for free. Stay tuned to this blog for behind-the-scenes info, deleted scenes, and news, but in the meantime, go check out the three episodes of the first season:

Enjoy and watch out for Stellar Graveyard flying rats!