Pulses was my first crack at a novel, written while I was stationed in Germany back in 1977. Used a Corona typewriter with a roll of whiteout tape built in. High tech stuff back then. I figured the longer the better when it came to novels. I finally stopped at 240,000 words.
It sat around for ten years since I had no idea what to do with it and since military assignments were putting me in places that weren’t exactly conducive to finding literary agents or publishers behind every bush. Eventually I did send it off to Scott Meredith in New York. He sent me back a ten-page, typewritten critique—three pages of what was good about it and seven of what wasn’t. And he asked me to write a shorter novel and send it back in. I did later write that novel, A Measure of the Earth, but never submitted it to Scott. Instead I let another 25 years go by before writing anything else.
Then, in 2012, I discovered I could publish an e-book in as little as ten minutes. So I tried that with several novels I’d recently completed. And just to see if anyone liked Pulses, I cut it down to a more manageable 194,000 words and put it out for inspection.
To my amazement, some did like it. Others hated it. And said so. And gave me good reasons why they hated it. Still, it remained, of my six novels, my second-best seller for almost a year, even though the other novels had much higher ratings. I have never figured out why that was the case, but perhaps my sister had some idea.
Several years ago, she reread Pulses and called to tell me it was, in spite of some highly critical reviews, a great story. She suggested I rewrite it to correct the things readers said they didn’t like. So as not to ignore her, and because I had intended to get around to it one day anyway, I read it for the first time since I’d written it and was appalled at the beginner’s mistakes littered throughout—the unanswered questions that I’d thought had enough clues in the text for readers to figure out and the long explanations of how the science involved in the starship worked. By then I knew a large percentage of readers didn’t like science, apparently didn’t understand it, and, most importantly, didn’t care to learn it. At least not while reading a novel. They just wanted a story.
But revising a gigantic novel like Pulses was a forbidding task. Especially since it was so poorly written. More years went by as I considered removing it from Kindle just so people didn’t waste 99 cents on it expecting a first-rate book.
In late summer of 2018, though, I finally acquiesced to my sister’s unflagging insistence that I fix Pulses. I broke it into three smaller novels, just so the story line wasn’t so daunting to read—or to rewrite. Then I went through it identifying areas needing a little work, areas needing a lot of work, and areas that needed to be deleted. It was a lot harder task than I had anticipated, but I stuck with it, if for no better reason than to say “I told you so” to my sister if or when the reviews and sales didn’t change.
So keep all of this in mind before you go squandering 99 cents on Part One of the rewrite. In offering Pulses as a trilogy, I ended up tripling the price, not by design but because that’s the minimum I can charge on Kindle Select. And I have to be in Select for the book to show up in the lending library for free. All of life, it seems, is a tradeoff.
On the plus side, I’m writing another novel, The Portals of Osiris, to explain some of the questions left hanging in Pulses. Not important questions, but little things that lend themselves to additional explanation. There’s a novel’s worth of those little things, which should make for an interesting writing experience for me. Not sure if that translates to an interesting reading experience for others. The only way to tell that, I suppose, is to write the darn thing and put it out there. It’s always something.
