No, that's you being a schmuck. You can't troll, you can't stay married, and you can't even find a business to live above that can stay open. You're sad man. Reeeeeal sad.
My understanding is closer to what Garamet said. Shatner lets people publish Tek War and other works using his name and has little to do with the origination and execution of the books beyond that.
Absolutely. No one in their right mind actually believes these folks don't have serious emotional/mental issues. Another example is illegal immigration. It's presented as a given that there will be some form of amnesty, thus moving the window to the left. How about floating the idea of hard labor camps or an automatic 5 year prison term as a way to move it back the other way?
Oh, that's too funny! It's one rendition of the Colossus of Rhodes. I can just imagine how that was received by the test audience. I've *got* to find out who the cover artist is. If it's Mario Larrinaga, I will howl... According to a reliable source, Shatner takes "story meetings" with his co-authors. Essentially he brings a "concept," they bounce it around for an afternoon, then they go off and do the writing with occasional input from him. He will also either credit his co-authors, as he does with the Reeves-Stevenses, or at least offer "special thanks" to them in the acknowledgments. Most Big Names won't do that. They'll insist on a ghostwriter, i.e., someone who is literally invisible. Only the Name, the ghost, the publisher, and their respective management know the ghost exists. There are confidentiality agreements, breach of which can earn a "you'll never work in this town again." And some Names won't even admit that there's a ghost involved.
It's fee for service, and as long as both parties are in agreement, there's certainly nothing wrong with it from the writers' POV. As for readers, a savvy reader can usually figure it out even if the co-author's not credited. The less-than-savvy reader often doesn't want to know. They get all huffy if you suggest that Mr. Big Name didn't actually write every single word on those pages.
Naively, I read some of Shatners Trek novels when I was younger and thought he'd actually written them. I was quite disappointed to find out that he hadn't.
Well, every collaboration is different, and while I don't know the exact process of the Shatner Trek novels, I kind of imagine the Reeves-Stevenses furiously taking notes as he acts out the various scenes, and then his leaving them in peace for months at a time to flesh out his concept, getting together occasionally to tweak things here and there. I've read some of his non-Trek stuff, and it has a consistent "voice," which I take to be his. A really good ghost/collaborator knows how to capture that without getting in the way. I don't doubt he'd have the skill to write a novel. He just doesn't have the time. It's a labor intensive process and, at his income level, not cost effective for him to do the actual writing. And having done a bit of collaboration myself, I can tell you it's an interesting change of pace to have someone else come up with the plotline and do all the serious "think work," while you just spool out the words. Money's good, too.
Yeah, from what I hear Shatner is into so much stuff that he's jumping pretty much all day every day, keeping on top of his various projects. Finding the several hundred hours it takes to pound out a novel would seem unlikely for him.
I think it's part of his plan to live forever. If Death got past the front door, he'd shrug him off. "Sorry, bud. Can't fit you into my schedule."
I like all of Shatner's books. Most all Trek writers are very knowledgeable about the Trek world. Even though he was Capt. Kirk he is not a total Trek wizard. As I see it, of course he didn't write the whole book. Its mainly his idea. Star Trek : Odyssey series which includes The Return Star Trek : The Mirror Universe Saga Its seems he was able to get the rights to bring Kirk back to life after dying on Veridian.
Confirmed: The Overton Window is ghost-written. Friend of my wife knows the book's editor @ S&S; one of his team of show writers hashed out the prose under Beck's aegis.
while obviously I most admire a writer who both creates a great concept and executes it in an entertaining fashion, I still have a certain amount of respect for anyone who can come up with the great concept even if the writing is farmed out because, in my own experience at least, a compelling plot is the hard part. That's not to say i can testify that even the plot is Beck's creation, but given where his mind stays it's not inconceivable.
Well there's also a question of how deep the concept and plot is prepared. If for instance, Beck simply said, "I want a book that's 'Atlas Shrugged' meets 'The Da Vinci Code' meets 'Left Behind' with my own political philosophy sprinkled throughout" (which this book sounds like) and left the actual details of the plot, he doesn't really deserve much in the way of praise for that IMO. Working off of that, there are certain elements and characters that almost have to be included by convention. You have to have a hero and heroine and the possibility of romantic involvement and panther-waking. You have to have a conspiracy that is hurting the world and hiding a truth. You have to have a few stock characters representing the conspiracy: a few foot soldiers, a midlevel guy, a (or THE) top guy, and a guy who the hero trusts and gets betrayed by (who can be one of the previous guys). You have to have a couple sacrificial lambs to help the hero and heroine on their quest and you have to have some reliable authority figure or figures who will help the hero and heroine resolve things. First the hero's just going about his life trying to make the best of things. Then the hero gets a hint of the conspiracy. Then the conspiracy starts stalking the hero. The hero outwits the conspiracy's first threat. The hero finds out a little more about the conspiracy. The hero and/or the heroine get threatened. They go on the run. Sexual tension mounts. They try to enlist allies against the conspiracy. Either the ally gets sacrificed or is really working for the conspiracy. The conspiracy reveals itself in full. The hero and the heroine somehow triumph over the conspiracy. The end.
Damn...you just saved Nova $26.00. In an interestingly Darwinist twist, there are two *used* copies of a book not yet released (reviewer copies, one assumes - I wonder if they're galley copies with the errata included?) selling on Amazon for $719.00 each. No indication that they're autographed or in any other way distinctive. Curious.
Actually, Nova can't afford to buy new books - she reads them from the library or waits until they are used and VERY cheap. But I got the idea. Still, nothing about that was a revelation to me, that set of points can be well or poorly executed. the concept I had in mind was what the nature of the conspiracy is and the implications and all that stuff that fleshes out the basic concept. As Cannall (or was it Patterson?) said on a recent episode of Castle, "there are only three reasons to commit murder..." That doesn't mean there isn't a practically infinite number of ways to describe one of those. I've often wondered, though, If I couldn't read through a dozen or so Patterson novels and pick up on the formula and write the same sort of stuff....but I won't digress into yet another dead end conversation about why I'm not writing in this thread...
Wow. I sure am glad someone with less than 100 posts at wordforge knows an anonymous person with such startling information!
Exactly right. That's why it's called "formula writing," and that's why it's so popular. Readers know what to expect from certain authors every single time. There's a safety in that kind of familiarity that's comforting to some, and readers can get very outspoken if a writer they've come to expect a certain formula from goes off in a different direction. Find the formula, and you can plug it in every time. I used to marvel at women coming out of my local library with a stack of 20+ romances that they'd devour within the four-week limit and then come back for more. Then again, you can watch one episode of a soap per year and discover that the characters are still rehashing the same plot line over and over again. As for the nature of the conspiracy in The Overton Window, you can probably save yourself the trip to the library. It's obviously Teh Gheys and Teh Evil Libruls...no spoilers necessary.
Ah, I see what you did, Garamet. Since you know Nova wouldn't care if Glenn Beck attacked liberals, you reframed it as "liberals and gays (and other groups such as transgendered people)." Nice use of the overton window on Nova.
