Transformation

Now, you didn't expected me to get much further before I went and renamed something, did you? If you've looked at the rest of the website, you'll have notice things have...um...transformed.

As I was progressing through the early development phase of Differentiation, I was struggling to make things work coherently beyond the first half of the novel. I knew what the problem was. I had two terrific settings inherited from the worlds of Integration and Juno. I knew how those worlds had evolved since the end of those novels. I knew who my primary characters were. I knew how the worlds would meet. I knew how the ghost-like alien race would come into play. Most importantly, I knew what had to happen at the end. Getting from the mid-point to the end just wouldn't work though.

Yesterday, on the drive home from visiting my son, the light bulb clicked on and I realised the error of my ways. One of my expectations was wrong, I really didn't know how the story should end, in fact I'd misinterpreted what the story was about all along. The big event I was planning for the end of the novel, actually needed to occur in the intervening years before the novel even starts. Doh!

With a bit of inspiration from the Anthropic Principle and Fermi's Paradox, I could see how things moved forward into a new ending, which worked in a much more satisfactory way. Still a lot to work out before I commit the first word into Scrivener, but now it feels right. This is the novel I want to write.

Of course, there was one more complication. The novel was named after the big event that would occur at the end...which is no longer the focus of the story at all. So Differentiation had to go...and Transformation was formed! Still a vaguely mathematical name, specifically thinking about matrix transformations. Matrix would have worked as a name too, but think that might have been taken.

Once I renamed that, and the focus of the story had changed, a better name for the trilogy itself sprung into my mind. Now that Tamboli is a name critical to the world of Long Division (as of the second edition) as well as Integration – and will be equally important to Transformation – it was obvious that the Irrational Trilogy had to go, transforming into...the Tamboli Sequence.

What else? Well, I've completed a final edit pass on Integration ahead of my son picking it up. That should be imminent, after which I expect to do some rework, depending on what he says. He's usually right in his criticisms!

I've also got the second edition of Long Division ready to publish after one final read through fixing an annoyingly large number of typos. I also had a revelation that now it follows on logically from Integration, it needed a very short Prologue to act as a bridge and also give a little foreshadowing. So I've added that, and you can see it in the Preview from the Long Division page on this website. I've gone through the cycle of being happy with Long Division when I first published it, to gradually being able to see its flaws, to back being very happy again. I'll publish the new version when Integration is ready to go.

Watch this space...