A few months ago I wrote a How I Did It post about my short story "The Barbary Shore." In it I mentioned that I was expanding that story into a novel. In point of fact, I had nearly finished expanding it when I wrote that post -- or so I thought.
When I turned "Barbary Shore" into the novel Corsair, I had to change some stuff. The battle between Captain Black the Space Pirate and his nemesis Captain Santiago of Space Command became just the first chapter, and the rest of the book tried to answer the question "And then what happened?"
I also changed the outcome of that first battle. Captain Black wins it, hands down. He's the supreme badass of space, and his bank accounts are full of pirate loot. He retires to a pirate-themed Caribbean resort island with his latest girlfriend. Life is good -- except that it isn't. David Schwartz isn't the sort of person who can enjoy doing nothing. He winds up getting recruited by a shadowy character calling himself "Colonel Ghavami" to run another helium-piracy job. David heads off to Asia to build a new pirate satellite.
Meanwhile Captain Santiago gets punished for losing her battle with Captain Black. She is pulled off the antipiracy operation and assigned to an experimental propulsion project run by a small startup company in Florida. One of the partners in the firm is Jack Bonnet, an astronaut. Jack and Elizabeth tentatively move towards a romance -- but Elizabeth is also secretly re-purposing the company's experimental solar-thermal test spacecraft to use as a pirate-hunter.
He gets double-crossed by his criminal partners and goes on the run, her scheme gets exposed and she's bounced out of the Air Force entirely . . . and then it turns out that David's criminal partners aren't really planning to steal the helium cargo at all. Their plans are much more sinister. The space pirate and the rogue pirate-hunter have to join forces as the clock of orbital mechanics ticks inexorably down.
I wrote the expanded version . . . and discovered that in my quest to keep the narrative lean and fast-paced, I must have gone a little overboard because it was simply too short! So now I'm doing some large-scale revising, with an eye toward bulking the book up by about 50 percent. This means minor characters get more "screen time," and I'm considering adding another subplot if I can braid it into the narrative without the seams showing.
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