How do you write a 1632 story for Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond? You need a story idea. Characters. Conflict. Continuity. And then don’t make it harder than it has to be. Let’s take a tour through the planning process. I’ve handed in the fourth Neustatter book, Security Solutions. Neustatter organized NESS in 1633. He hired additional agents in 1634. Spoiler: He’s hiring more in 1635. What if, in 1636, he hires an up-timer? That’s the story idea. Okay, I cheated. It might be one character arc in NESS 6 or so. But it could be a 1632 & Beyond story on its own. The next thing I need is characters. Again, I’m not trying to make this hard. We can assume that Edgar Neustatter and Astrid Schäubin are going to be two of the central characters. All I need is the up-timer. The grid is going to give me the rest. I haven’t started searching yet, so I don’t know who the up-timer is. He or she will have family. They’re either going to support this person working for NESS or they’re going to oppose it. I don’t know yet, because I haven’t seen the information. And here’s an important skill: Stay flexible. My first thought is a boy right out of high school, and his parents are naturally concerned. But I’m not locked in. Maybe it’s a boy right out of high school, and he can’t join the Army or the National Guard for some reason. Maybe it’s a girl. There’s no point in speculating further right now. What we need to do now is go to the up-timer grid. That’s here: https://author.1632magazine.com/getting-started/the-grid/ Ideally, I want to narrow my options down to a handful of characters I can look into further. I start by opening the CSV vile in Excel. If you just downloaded it, save it. Tip: Do…
Short Stories
by Eric Flint | Feb 19, 2020 | Blog | 23 comments “Tempus fugit” is a Latin phrase that officially translates as “time flies.” What it really is, though, is a hoity-toity way of saying “old farts forget stuff.” The old fart in this instance being me—and what I forgot was that my novel 1632 was published exactly twenty years ago. Well… Using the term “exactly” with some poetic license. The book was indeed published in February of 2000, but I’m pretty sure it was published earlier than the 18th day of the month. So I’m fudging a little. By any reasonable measure of the term “success,” 1632 was a successful novel. To begin with, it was successful on its own terms. It sold—this is taken directly from my royalty reports so there’s no fudging at all—7,458 copies in hardcover, which was very good at the time for hardcover sales. Better still, it also had a 69% sell-through. For those of you not familiar with publishing lingo, “sell-through” means the percentage of books printed and shipped that are actually sold. The industry average is around 50%, so 69% is very good, That was the initial hardcover print run. Since then, Baen Books has done a special edition leather-bound hardcover edition ($36.00 a copy BUT CHEAP AT THE PRICE) that has sold 765 copies at a 77% sell-through. Furthermore, the novel is still in print after twenty years, and has sold over 140,000 copies in paperback with a 88% sell-through, which is like incredibly, spectacularly good. A publishing house which has a book that maintains an 88% sell-through over two decades has essentially been able to legally print money for all that time. And—I love this fact because I sneer at so-called “electronic piracy”—keep in mind that 1632 has been available electronically FOR FREE for about the last eighteen years and… still just keeps selling and selling. Every year I get royalty payments for the book somewhere between $4,000 and $5,000. But the novel doesn’t stand on…