About The People Out There

I have long been fascinated by actors and the roles they play. It started in the early 1980s, when I read a Star Trek fan fiction short story called "Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited," in which William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelly are busy filming the episode "Mirror, Mirror" and are transported into the bodies of the actual characters they played on Star Trek.

Years later, when I started writing fan fiction myself, I did a riff on this theme, for a story I wrote about NCIS, using my tentacled characters of Alpha, Gamma and the Great One and 1950s-ish names for their technology.

Then I decided the idea was too good to waste on fan fiction and decided to create a TV series (of the mind) of my own, and write an actual fantasy novel about what would happen if the actors and their real-life counterparts were actually made to switch bodies.

The title, The People Out There, was actually a pun, or play on words (or at least an attempt at a pun or play on words) because it referred to both the audience of people who watch a TV show or movie and sometimes confuse the actors with their roles, and The People Out There - the aliens from a distant solar system who arrange events for their own amusement.

The umbrella title of what I hoped to be a series, The Coldest Equations is of course a riff on the famous X Minus One radio episode, "The Cold Equations," in which a teenage girl has stowed aboard a rocket ship that must hurry to a planet suffering from an epidemic. The ship doesn't have enough fuel with two people aboard, so the pilto must eject the girl into space where she'll die.

The plots of my The Coldest Equations doesn't resemble that in the slightest, but I chose it for, I admit, rather opportunistic reasons...I was hoping people who would search on the web for "The Cold Equations," would find my The Coldest Equations and be intrigued enough by the title to buy it.

Way back in 2011, I published The Coldest Equations: The People Out There on the Kindle and Nook where it promptly was never purchased by anyone. The novel featured the TV characters more than the people whose bodies the actors were inhabiting, and I decided that that might be confusing to a lot of people.

So I then conceived the idea of writing an introductory novella which would give a background on the plot of the TV show - although I treated it just as a novelization of the TV show.

That novella is "The Labyrinth Makers" - and that novella sells, although whether because it's actually good or because it only costs 99 cents I do not know. No one who reads it has reviewed it. However, after not having read it for two years, I recently reread it and it is indeed very good.

I recently reread The Coldest Equations: The People Out There and that unfortunately is not very good.

Well...most of it is very good, but the opening chapter, which I included at the end of "The Labyrinth Makers" as a teaser, is very long and boring and does need to be rewritten (and doubtless explains why no one who has bought "The Labyrinth Makers" has ever then gone on to buy The People Out There.

I have remove The Coldest Equations: The People Out There from the Kindle and Nook therefore, and will be sharing this light-hearted fantasy/sci fi "fan fiction" stoyr here on this blog..

This blog therefore features an intertwined storyline, with the actors and actresses who star in the TV series, and their adventures on Earth II (and vice versa.)

The book series of The Coldest Equations which I will continue to publish on Kindle and the Nook deals strictly with the near future and Miranda Rainbird and her adventures. The next book in the series is entitled Chase Me Faster and will be published later in 2013.