How the Spiral Slayers became a quadrilogy

Hi,
As promised, I'll explain how The Spiral Slayers became a quadrilogy. 

In 2005 I switched from attempting to start a company that created animated book trailers (www.virtualmediastudios.com) to writing my book. Actually, I had started writing another one of my stories in 2001--'The Tale of the Blood Rose Mantis' and had made significant progress when my hard drive went out and I lost all of it. I was not doing backups. This disaster hurt so much that I stopped writing for over three years.

The Spiral Slayers was suppose to be a single book however, when you start on something new it is easy to make the simplest of mistakes. I had the entire story planned out and was about 20% through the story when I had a thought...'word count', I wonder what the word count is supposed to be for a new sci-fi novel. This detail hadn't even crossed my mind so I Googled it and found that 120,000 words was the limit. I checked my word count and saw that it was over 200,000 words! Whoops.

For three months I struggled with a solution. First I tried to reduce the story but the amount I needed to reduce it was too much. Then I wrestled with trying to divide it into three parts. Finally I gave in and settled for four parts. This meant that I would not be able to send it to an agent or publisher--no one was going to look at a new author offering a quadrilogy.  So, I considered switching to a different story but I was so in the groove on this one. Once I decided I was just going to have to continue with a four book series and self publish it, I then had to divide the story into four books which took another month.

Live and learn.

My next entry will explain how I created extensions to the (quantum) standard model and cosmology to create the Spiral Slayer universe.

Rusty Williamson