"Steven Krane - Teek" - читать интересную книгу автора (Krane Steven)

In 1993 I had just become a full-time writer. I had two books in print, one on the way, and I had a
contract to complete a very ambitious trilogy. The typical writer's income being what it is, this meant I
lived in a basement apartment and survived on a diet of rice and Ramen noodles. Being single at the
time, the lifestyle didn't bother me all that much. What did bother me was my first serious episode of
writer fatigue.

The first three books were all narrowly focused on a single protagonist. All I had to do, really, was sit on
the character's shoulder and follow him or her around. They were also fairly moderate in length, around
eighty-thousand words, which is actually a short story compared to some of the hyperthyroidic novels in
print nowadays.

In October of 1993, I was about halfway into something very different for me. The trilogy I had agreed
to write was multiple-viewpoint, with two main characters, about a dozen major characters, and a cast of
thousands. It was also, essentially, a single novel with a braided plot line about four times the length of
anything else I'd ever written.

I was having serious doubts about finishing it. Towards the end of the middle book it just kept getting
slower and slower, and I was getting more and more depressed. It was getting to the point where I
would wake up, sit myself in front of my computer (For trivia buffs, the machine happened to be an
Amiga 500) and stare at the screen for a few hours and, maybe, write a new paragraph.

When I hit bottom, and had stared at the screen for an hour, I basically said to myself— Ok, you are not
getting up until you write a thousand words. Fuck the damn novel, just write something, anything!

So I wrote. What I wrote was about as far from my current project as I could have gotten at that point.
Instead of writing politically-charged militaristic gadget SF, I was following this teenage girl home from
high school whose most earth-shattering problem— at the time the scene appeared, anyway— was this
guy named Chuck who was stalking her. I managed to get my thousand words and change, I finished the
whole chapter that day. (Now chapter four, by the way.)

This made me feel like a writer again, so I did the same exercise the next day, and chapter two flew
across the screen. The next day, chapter three...

For the rest of that month, the trilogy lay idle while Teek took over my life. I disconnected my phone,
refused to answer my door, and only went outside for brief periods when I needed to get some fresh air.
When I wasn't actually writing Teek, I was thinking about it. The book itself was written in real time for
the most part, the original draft climaxing on Halloween. Completing the book was so physically and
emotionally draining that I had to spend a week recovering. I couldn't even read for pleasure, I couldn't
concentrate on the words.

It did, however, restore my confidence in myself as a writer. The trilogy was completed, and I went on
to new contracts. Teek, unfortunately, being something written on spec, didn't get a lot of my attention
after I wrote it. For two years I spent time off-and-on rewriting it. Eventually I redid the ending
completely, and added the multiple viewpoints. (The original novel was considerably shorter, and solely
from Allie's point of view.)
Strangely, though, while this novel was in this authorial limbo, it attracted attention from a lot of quarters.
A few publishers offered to take it, but wanted exclusive rights to my future work— which wasn't
something I was willing to do given my relationship with DAW. I had an agent come out and, essentially,
offer to pay my expenses while I completed the rewrite— considering the agent wasn't my own, and I