So, I’m almost done with a solid first draft of ONE BLOOD, my prequel to DANCE WITH THE DRAGON (one chapter left to read to my critique group), and I decide to reread DD. Mind you, by the time one of my books comes out, I’ve committed a lot of it to memory. On the other hand, DD was the first book I had published, back in 2003, and it was submitted to Amber Quill a year before that.
Therein lie some of the challenges. A lot has happened in the world over the past seven years. I have had readers comment to me that DD is a bit behind the times in technology. The most glaring example is when a cassette tape falls out of a boom box! Street kids may still carry boom boxes (better for annoying the people around them than an iPod), but today it would have a CD, at least. Also, when a victim is kidnapped there’s no mention of whether she tries to use a cell phone.
I was aware of these glitches, but in rereading, I discovered some others. I mentioned PEAR, a psychic-research organization that existed at the time in Princeton but has since downsized and changed its name. In OB, I gave it a completely fictional name. And the explanation that my heroine gives to someone for how she ended up living and working with the hero is different from what I have done in ONE BLOOD.
Now you could say, why don’t you just make it exactly the same as in DD? Because the way I’m doing it in OB works a lot better!
A while back, I mentioned some of the glitches to my editor and publisher, and asked about revising DD for future editions. They told me it would be a lot of trouble, pretty much like publishing a whole new book. My editor suggested that I set OB in an earlier time period, too, so that both could be read as set around the Millenium.
At first I didn’t like that idea, but now I’m mulling some version of it. I thought of putting a disclaimer at the beginning of OB, saying that it is set two years before DD, around “the turn of the 21st century.” I will mention that readers who go on to DD will find some discrepencies between the name of the psychic institute and the explanation that the heroine gives for how she hooked up with the hero. Seems to me that would cause the least disruption.
Any thoughts? Alternate suggestions?
Why not flat out say it’s set in 2000 or 2002 or some specific date? That was already a decade ago, so why not place the book firmly in the past?
In effect, that’s what I would do. I hate to pin it down to a particular year, because if I mention a minor event — such as a Halloween parade in a certain town — some nitpicker might say, “That didn’t happen on a Thursday in 2000, it happened on a Tuesday!” But I think for a couple of reasons it might be good to set it before 9-11.