Strangely, this was also an item that Scott Pearson and Robert Greenberger must have decided they didn't need in "The Complete Unauthorized History of Star Trek"...
Odd. Both Scott and Bob are dear friends and if they knew it existed, I find it hard to believe they'd have left it out.
Kristen, you nominally can produce a new Voyager novel in the 8 to 12 month range?
The heavy lifting on any book usually takes six months. That's from the moment I start breaking a new story, create the short outline for preliminary approval for my editor, create the long-form outline from which I write, and then write the manuscript. I like to have at least four months for manuscript. I don't ever plan to take days off but sometimes life happens so it's unavoidable.
I'm usually looking to get 1,500 usable words out of any given day's writing. It tends to take about 100 days to make that happen. The last few weeks are for major or minor re-writes once I can see the whole thing in some sort of final "shape" before sending it off to my editor for their first pass.
After the editor does their work, I incorporate their changes and notes. If I'm really lucky, that takes ten days or so. It has been known to take as long as a month.
Usually a few weeks after that, the book is in the production pipeline...I usually get three more passes after that...copyedits, and two once it's in "book" form. At that point we're no longer working from the original word file I created but from a pdf of the pages once they have been laid out. That whole process usually takes six to eight months.
That's sort of the "normal" schedule. I'm pretty sure
Full Circle took more like eight months for me to write.
Unworthy and
Children of the Storm were closer to six, but most of the "prep" work on
Unworthy happened before
Full Circle, so we made up ground there. And its production schedule was definitely tighter.
Eternal Tide was another eight month writing process. I felt like that book was never going to be finished.
Protectors was outlined and ready to start writing in January of 2013 and the moment it was done, I started the outlines for
Acts. That manuscript was done mid-December.
I had a whole ten days off before I started fiddling with the new one. Am in process on the long-form outline now.
Until we started
Protectors I usually had, for a variety of reasons, a few months or more of downtime before the next project started. I've been back to back since the beginning of last year and for now, there is no end in sight.
Probably more than you wanted to know, but there it is...
Best,
Kirsten Beyer
