We sat down and had a chat with Steve Metcalf, the author of Red Jack Press's most recent publication "The Merchant of Time." It's a young-adult fantasy story. An adventure set against the backdrop of an impossible city filled with wonderful and strange creatures. After reading the novel, we had a few questions ...
1. Where did this idea come from?
This is a question writers both love and hate because, often, the answer is not great. Sometimes the answer is clever and interesting. Sometimes the answer is oddly boring. This one, unfortunately, is the latter. Planning for Merchant of Time began way back in 2006 and it really was that one question. “What would happen if you owned an hour?” Of course the question got tweaked, refined and expanded – but it always remained the same. The boring part of the answer, though, is that I don’t really know where that question came from.
I'll give myself some measure of credit, though, for following through on it. All kinds of stuff happened from me writing the original opening scene in the lawyer’s office all the way through typing those magical words The End. It would have been easy to just stick it in a folder and let it get dusty.
2. What was the most challenging aspect of working on Merchant of Time?
I’ve always been a writer, but the format has never stayed the same. All through high school and into undergrad, I wrote short stories. After being out of school for a few years I decided to switch gears and I started writing screenplays. I wrote several screenplays, both feature length and shorts, during that time. When that was winding down, I wrote my so-far only nonfiction book “Reset,” about the video game industry. I wrote a few more screenplays after that but had decided at that time to go back to prose. It took me several years (working around a marriage, cross-country move, and a career change) but I never gave up.
Merchant of Time was my first actual novel, so it’ll always hold a special place in my heart. Sure, a dozen novels and story collections were published before it … but this was the very first book I wrote. The first draft was finished in August 2010 and the text went through numerous revisions, but the structure – the story – always remained the same. I’m proud (and just a little nervous) to be releasing this one for the world to see! Outside of “Sketch,” there’s probably more of “me” in this book than anything I’ve written.
3. Were there any major cuts or additions that came to you during the revision process?
Nothing was cut, but there were quite a few additions, actually. And just for illustrative purposes, the original draft was just about 44k words. The final published draft was closer to 61k. That’s a significant amount of text that was added through revisions. None of the stuff that happened in the library was in the original draft. Alison Nguyen had a much smaller role in the initial version of the story. In fact, the entire chapter that took place the first 5 o’clock after the reading of the will was added into the second draft. The epilogue, the story of the creation of the Inside, was the last thing added to the story. It was actually added after the sequel, “Lot 23,” was written.
It took almost exactly 13 years from the completion of the first draft to the publication of the final draft. In that time, of course, I was always working on something else … but Merchant was never far from my thoughts. Honestly, more than anything, I'd have to credit my wife Anak for never letting me give up on the story. As a writer, you're constantly bombarded with new plots, new characters, new ideas that you want to explore. Anak, though, was having a great time reading the new pages of Merchant that were coming out ... and kept reminding me how much I loved that story.
4. What other stuff are you working on right now?
I don’t know them all personally, but I’m pretty sure every creative writer has a growing to-do list of plots and, worse, stories that were started and never finished. I have four levels of stories. Level one is just a list of plots floating around aimlessly in my head. Level two are those plots that actually warrant getting written down, usually in logline format (from my history of writing screenplays) and usually on whatever steno pad that’s currently in my desk drawer. Level three are those plots that start to get fleshed out a little more. These plots graduate from the steno pad to a manilla folder. I can continue to add notes about scenes, locations, characters and dialogue on random slips of paper into the folder. Once the story idea is detailed enough, it moves on to level four – being written. Even level four is dangerous, however, because many stories sit there partially written but never finished.
But the real answer to the question is that I’m actively writing four stories right now. This is a first for me. Usually I keep it to one or two at a time. I’m working on the first two stories in the “Jack Madden” adventure series, I’m working on writing the final section of my story “Phoenix Hill” and I’m writing a fun side-project … a kid’s story. I’ll probably finish them in the order I’ve laid out, but it’s neat to be able to fire up any of those four Word documents and knock out a scene or two.
5. You mentioned a sequel and the story carries a subtitle … “A Tale from the Secret City.” What’s next for Charlie, Alison, Max and the rest of the crew?
I did and it does! Merchant was always supposed to be a trilogy of books. I think I mentioned it in the afterword to the story. They were all things that directly came out of the reading of Uncle Bernard's will. Merchant of Time was based on Charlie's inheritance of the hour. The Hollow Mountain is something the kids get to through Max's Intelligencia Golumbica (they find a ship in there ... shhhhh). The Three Stories focuses on the three partially-completed novels that Wes inherited. Unfortunately, or fortunately – depending on your perspective, I came up with another plot I wanted to explore before the two planned sequels. “What if young Charlie figured out a way to get from his dreams into the dreams of someone else?” That would be Lot 23. It’s a fun story and, in many ways, it's more refined than Merchant. Once that one is published, I’ll start working on Hollow Mountain in earnest. I did have an idea for a novella called “The Crisis Factory” that explains the origins of an antagonist in Lot 23 … a pleasant fella called “The Zombie King.” That’s one of the numerous stories on the aforementioned growing to-do list! It's still only Level Two, though. I'll let you know when it graduates to the manilla folder stage! I’m sure I’ll eventually get to them all …
If you haven't yet had a chance to read through Steve's "The Merchant of Time," you can find it on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle versions.
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