My regular readers know that I was honored to be asked to participate in The Columbus Dispatch's Create a Classic Novel event but this has almost come to a screeching halt after what happened today.

The whole idea is that a story starts with 1,500 words from a writer at the Dispatch and is then handed off to another author who takes the story in a new direction (while keeping it rooted to what came before from other authors) in another 1,500 words which then get handed off and so on.

So, I was asked to write Chapter 6 and did so. The editor was on vacation the day of my deadline and it didn't get posted until two days late. Well, the next writer must have assumed that he had to work off the previous chapter and didn't bother to check and see if a new chapter was posted (although how he missed the fact that he was supposed to have written Chapter 7, which picks up when Chapter 6 ends, I'm not quite sure).

At any length, the new chapter they posted picks up where the one before mine ended. So the guy completely wrote over my stuff as if it had never been posted.

Now, don't get me wrong, Holbrook did a fine job of writing a good scene and even brought up an interesting twist to the concept of the Naiades project (turning humans into oil and water for use by other humans--a nice holocaust with a purpose theme) but I would have liked to have seen him tie that in with the direction I took before him.

See, most science fiction novels and stories are written by flaming liberals. I am not a flaming liberal and at first I found the whole "global warming and overpopulation wasting the planet's resources" to be completely cliche. That's why the twist I took (an alien organism mutating humanity from an energy process breaking down oxygen into energy with carbon dioxide waste into a type of photosynthesis) to be pretty novel and a kind of "alright you tree-hugging plant worshippers--have your way--you are plants now so shut the fug up about it."

But I can't blame the next writer. There was a time gap where he legitimately could have thought that chapter 5 was his starting point.

But that doesn't mean I'm not pissed off about watching a decent story go bad. I have found it so hard to collaborate often with other writers in the past because the egos rarely mesh and I usually just end up pissed off.

And as a further aside, let me just say that my problem with literary fiction (the kind taught in universities and writing programs) is that there are rarely great stories involved. There may be good characters and good scenes (sometimes both in the same piece) but rarely are there great stories (the kind you remember regardless of the language.

The best is when you get great characters, great scenes and truly great stories. I haven't come across too many of those but those I have, I keep very close to my heart and on the top of my bookshelf.