Ken Goddard's
Fiction-Writing Web Site

I finished FINAL DISPOSITION several months ago, but Eleanor (my literary agent) and I have been unable to convince Bantam (or any other publisher so far) that it's either a reasonable conclusion to my FIRST EVIDENCE series, or a logical stepping stone to a fourth Colin Cellars story.

I do understand that this is a tough time to be turning manuscripts into 'dead tree' books; but I've gotten a lot of emails basically urging me to get my lazy butt back in front of a computer so they can read the third book in the series.  So I finally did the logical thing, which was to convert all of my novels (including Final Disposition) into eBook format.  They're now available on the eBook sites in the U.S. and UK, specifically including Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and iTunes.

CHIMERA - The Novel

While waiting for a publisher to take an interest in FINAL DISPOSITION, I wrote a slightly futuristic manuscript about some wealthy and arrogant trophy-hunting poachers who take a self-serving interest in genetic manipulation.  The story takes place in the humid forests of Thailand and a frozen wilderness in the Northwest Cascade mountains, and involves a frightened Russian geneticist, three lethal former-SAS commandos, a beautiful Thai princess/warrior, some incredibly lethal predators, and a stubborn Special Agent of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service who finds himself in way over his head in many different ways.

I had a lot of fun writing CHIMERA; and it was even more fun when I flew out to Phuket, Thailand (for another coral reef CSI training course) where I got to see the scenery upon which much of the story is based first-hand.  But my enthusiasm for the story hasn't rubbed off on any publisher yet, so I decided it was time to take a new approach to my fiction writing and turn CHIMERA into a screenplay.

CHIMERA - The Screenplay

Having already adapted two of my earlier novels (PREY and FIRST EVIDENCE) into screenplays, I was more-or-less prepared for the mental agony of discarding at least half of the novel characters and scenes; but I wasn't prepared for the screenplay to take off in several different directions and evolve into a completely different story arc.  The end result was a much more visual, fast-paced and intense story that would make for a much more interesting novel.  So ...

CHIMERA - The Revised Novel

... while I waiting in hope that my Hollywood agents can find a buyer for the CHIMERA screenplay, I re-wrote the CHIMERA manuscript to match the screenplay, and it's now available on the eBook sites.

And yes, it has occurred to me that I probably ought to be writing my stories as screenplays first, to get that tight and focused story arc, and then flesh it out into a far more detailed manuscript; but that sounds an awful lot like an old-dog/new-trick problem. We will see how that goes ...