Chateau Lloyd

One of my colleagues at Bleeding Fool has reported that Disney is now so desperate for recycled material that they are going to do backstories on all the characters they killed off in The Acolyte.

This is taking the strange obsession with retconning and prequels to its logical and absurd conclusion.

No story ever moves forward; that's dangerous.  Current writing emphasizes world-building and details rather than plot, character development and progression.

The Star Wars setting has immense potential for standalone stories, yet all Disney has done is try to recycle existing material, and in the process has created a host of contradictions that destroy the integrity of the thing.  When the stories were pushed forward, they were hateful takes on existing characters, so one can see why no one has had the stomach to revisit the disastrous sequel trilogy.

Yet.

I've written about prequels before and I don't like them.  Many of my settings could easily accommodate them, but why move backwards when one can move forward?  I suppose one could argue that if I did a book for The Vampires of Michigan about the bootlegging years, that wouldn't be a prequel so much as a different story in the same setting, especially if I use different characters.

That would be the only way I can see it working.  When I write a character, I don't generally create a full and massive biography just in case.  I flesh out only the details I have.  Going back and adding in more risks the integrity of what already exists, and one can see this in how much J.R.R. Tolkien struggled to make his concept of Galadriel work.  She had a backstory when he wrote Lord of the Rings, but as he dug deeper into the First Age, he went back and forth about who she was and how she got where she was.

The published version of her in The Silmarillion is not the final form, which was still in draft.  Instead, Christopher Tolkien, his son and literary executor, chose the most finished version, which was also in line with existing texts.

If a genius like Tolkien struggled to make prequels and backstories work, I'm far less qualified to bother with it.

I am thinking about sequels however, and many of my books are suitable for that.  This intrigues me because I've yet to try it, and it would probably be good for sales because the original book would get a boost.  It's been difficult to write of late, but I'm restructuring my schedule to make it more friendly for that pursuit.

Even better, I'm starting to get ideas about what scenes I would run.  Writing has been a helpful hobby for many years and I miss it.  Hopefully I'll be back in the swing of things soon.