The book felt massively padded to me. For instance, we're into the vault in
the movie within about 3 minutes. That segment was stretched out to something
like 20 pages or more.
I went through and made indications were the padding should be cut out...and
after it was all cut, there was only about two-thirds of a book left. It
needed a b-story or elemen to flesh it out, which Peter and others did with the
novelizations, but wasn't done here. So I asked Fiona to come up with one,
since I was frantic at the time with production and we didn't get any
indication from Del Rey of a desire to come up with one. She did so, writing
out a detailed outline that fit and worked well. There was no money involved,
she did it just to help, and asked only for a small credit somewhere in the
book, along the lines of "additional material supplied by...."
In any event, the process dragged on, and it didn't seem to work out, and
finally the book was jointly killed. It's obvious the author tried her best,
but we look for a kind of approach that fits in with the rest of the books, and
this one just didn't work on that level.
If the author is slamming our reference editor, that's unfortunate, because it
was my call on the book from start to finish.
jms
(jms...@aol.com)
B5 Official Fan Club at:
http://www.thestation.com
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