John Scalzi - Zoe`s Tale

I sat, and looked, and remembered in the present time.

And when I was sure I had it, I kissed the window and drew the shade.

The engines on the shuttle came to life.

"Here we go," Dad said.

I smiled and closed my eyes and counted down the seconds until liftoff.

Five. Four. Three. Two.

One.

At the end of my book The Last Colony, I mentioned that I was likely to step away from the "Old Man's War" universe for a while, and in particular that I was going to give the characters of John Perry and Jane Sagan a rest, and let them have their "happily ever after." So, it can be reasonably asked, what is Zoe's Tale doing here now?

There are a number of reasons, but two big ones have to do with reader feedback. The first was that I got a lot of mail that went like this: "Hey, The Last Colony was great. Now write another one. And make it about Zoë. Also, I want a pony." Well, I couldn't do anything about the pony (sorry), but the more I thought about it the more I realized that I was interested in knowing more about Zoë as well. Zoë had played critical supporting roles in The Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony, and enough had happened to her in the course of the books that I thought there would be enough to tell her story and make it interesting. It's up to you to tell me if I was right about that, but I'll say that I'm pretty happy.

The other bit of reader feedback involved two criticisms of The Last Colony. In that book, the "werewolves," the indigenous intelligent species of Roanoke, played a role in a critical plot point, and having done that, went away for the rest of the book. I thought I had sufficiently explained their disappearance, but more than a few readers were either unsatisfied with the explanation or missed it entirely, and so I got a bunch of mail that asked "Where did the werewolves go?" This annoyed me, not because the readers were complaining but because clearly I was not as clever explaining their exit from the story as I would have liked.

To go with this, there was some (totally fair) criticism of TLC that Zoë going off into space and somehow coming back with a "sapper field" that was pretty much exactly what the defenders of Roanoke needed to defeat their attackers represented a complete deus ex machina maneuver on the part of a lazy writer. Yes, well. This is the problem of knowing more than your readers; as an author, I knew all the back story, but there was no way to get it into the book without wrenching the whole book onto a 30,000-word tangent. So I did a little hand waving and hoped I wouldn't get caught. Surprise! Apparently I have smart readers.

So in both these cases of reader dissatisfaction, writing Zoe's Tale allowed me a second bite at these apples, and in the process helped to make the events that take place in the "Old Man's War" universe more internally consistent and comprehensible. What have we learned here? Mostly that I do listen to feedback from my readers, both positive ("write more!") and negative ("fix that!"). Thanks for both.

Because I wanted to address reader questions, and because I thought it would be fun and interesting to do, I wrote Zoe's Tale to take place in parallel time to the events of The Last Colony, told from an entirely different point of view. Naturally, I'm not the first person to think of this clever trick (and here I perform a hat tip to my particular inspirations, Orson Scott Card with Ender's Shadow and Tom Stoppard for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), but stupid me, I thought it would actually be easy.

Indeed, I recall actually saying this to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, my editor: "I already know the plot and the characters; how hard can it be?" Patrick did not do what he should have done, which was to grab me hard by the shoulders, shake me like a maraca and say, "Good God, man, are you insane?!?" Because here's a little secret: writing a parallel time novel that does not, in fact, just lazily retell the story in a previous book is hard. Like, the hardest thing I've done as a writer to this point. And, damn it, Patrick's job as my editor is to make everything easy for me. So I feel he bears some responsibility for my months of complete flailure trying to write the novel (yes, flailure: "failure" + "flailing" = flailure. Look it up). So, yes: I blame Patrick. For everything. There, I feel better now.

(Note: The above paragraph is a complete lie: Patrick's patience and understanding and advice during this writing process was invaluable. But don't tell him that. Shhh. It's our little secret.)

The other really hard thing about Zoe's Tale was the fact that I was writing it from the point of view of a teenage girl, which is something I've never been, personally, and was a species of creature I can't say I actually understood back when I was a teenage boy (this will not come as news to my female contemporaries at high school).

For too long a time, I despaired how I would ever actually get a writing tone approximating that of an actual teenage girl, nor did I get particularly good advice from my male friends on this one. "So go hang out with teenage girls," is an I-swear-to-God actual quote from a male friend of mine, who is apparently oblivious to the social and legal implications of a thirty-eight-year-old emphatically un-Brad-Pitt-like man lurking around sophomore-aged girls.

So, I did something I think was smarter and less liable to get me a restraining order: I showed some of the work in progress to women I trust—all of whom, so I'm told, were teenage girls at one point in their lives. These women—Karen Meisner, Regan Avery, Mary Robinette Kowal, and especially my wife Kristine Blauser Scalzi—were instrumental in helping me find a voice that worked for Zoë, and equally unsparing when I got too caught up in my own imagined cleverness with the character. To the extent Zoë works as a character, you may credit their influence; to the extent that she doesn't, you can blame me.

I've already mentioned Patrick Nielsen Hayden as my editor, but there are others at Tor Books who have worked on the book as well, and I would like to offer my public thanks to them for their work. They include John Harris, who gave the book its most excellent cover; Irene Gallo, the world's best art director; copy editor Nancy Wiesenfeld, whom I pity for having to catch my many screwups; and my publicist at Tor, Dot Lin. Thanks also and as always to my agent Ethan Ellenberg, and also to Tom Doherty.

Friends! I have them, I don't even have to pay them, and they helped me keep it together when I felt like I was going to completely blow apart. Thanks in particular go to Anne KG Murphy, Bill Schafer, Yanni Kuznia and Justine Larbalestier, each of whom I spent more time chatting with on IM than I probably should have, but oh well. Devin Desai called me on a regular basis, which also helped to keep me from bouncing off the proverbial walls. Thanks also to Scott Westerfeld, Doselle Young, Kevin Stampfl, Shara Zoll, Daniel Mainz, Mykal Burns, Wil Wheaton, Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Nick Sagan, Charlie Stross, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Liz Gorinsky, Karl Schroeder, Cory Doctorow, Joe Hill, my sister Heather Doan, and lots of other folks whose names escape me at the moment because I always blank out when I start making lists of names.

Also, an extra special set of thanks to the readers of my blog Whatever, who had to put up with quite a lot of disruptions this year as I tried to get this book done. Fortunately, they're good at keeping themselves amused while I'm banging on the keyboard like a monkey. And a fond farewell to readers of By the Way and Ficlets.

Certain names in the book are borrowed from people I know, because I'm really bad at making up names. So hat tips are in order to my friends Gretchen Schafer, Magdy Tawadrous, Joe Rybicki, Jeff Hentosz, and Joe Loong, who has the special distinction of having been murdered in two of my books now. It's not a trend, Joe. I swear.