Where Did SOLFLEET Come From?

PART 3 – PREGNANCY

With a new concept and a definite direction and goal—not to mention a great new major character, courtesy of my younger brother—I dove back into the deep end. I wrote for hours and hours whenever I could—day after day, week after week, month after month. As I made the changes and incorporated nearly all of the the ideas that I had written down in my side notes, my 360+ page manuscript grew…and grew…and grew. When it grew to exceed 1,000 pages I came to realize that I was going to have to break it into two books, and when it grew to exceed 1,300 pages those two books became three, and the premiere trilogy was formed.

Of course, breaking one story into a trilogy means having to tell three complete stories. The original story would play out over the three volumes, but each book had to tell a story and come to some kind of conclusion as well. For this reason, when I finally finished the initial rewrite, I had to go back and determine what individual story each book would tell.

Five years after Pocket Books rejected my Star Trek novel—five years after I began to remove the Star Trek elements and write my own creation—I completed the manuscript for the first book of the Solfleet trilogy. The time had come to consider names—to christen it with an awesome title. I thought long and hard about that, knowing that once a company published it, if a company published it, it would have that title forever.

It was the first of three books that formed a trilogy. All of my planned stories—there were about thirty at the time—centered on Solfleet the way the various incarnations of Star Trek centered on Starfleet, so “Solfleet” would be part of the title. Somewhere from six to eight books would relate to the time-travel mission, so “Timeshift” would be part of the title as well, and since that many books could be considered a saga, I decided that “The Timeshift Saga” would work well. Wanting three individual book titles that would both emphasize duty and honor and tie the three books together, I came up with “The Call of Duty”, “Beyond the Call of Duty”, and “Above and Beyond the Call of Duty”, which seemed to accomplish that goal perfectly. Finally, I needed a title for the trilogy itself, or so I thought at the time, and since the starcruiser Excalibur was pivotal to the entire plot, “The Excalibur Trilogy” seemed to be the logical choice.

All of that fine logical reasoning led me to christen the first book Solfleet: The Timeshift Saga: The Call of Duty: Book One of the Excalibur Trilogy. It was official. My 582-page manuscript for the first Solfleet book had a title nearly as long as the manuscript itself, but at the time I loved it. All I had to do was find a publisher to put it out there.