Writing the Special Editions Part I: The Writer Compares Himself to Tolkien*

* - Just a little, and that's Christopher Tolkien; not J.R.R.

If you're a Tolkien fan, you've likely at least heard of The History of Middle-earth series (as well as other, similar works).

My Tolkien shelf

In J.R.R.'s lifetime, only The Hobbit and the three Lord of the Rings books were published.  The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and other books came later, but here's the thing: they were compiled and edited by his son, Christopher.  After Silmarillion was published in the '70s, Christopher embarked on what proved to be a monumental four-decade-long task of gathering, cataloguing, editing, and publishing seemingly all of his father's writings on Middle-earth.  And this entailed much more than what we saw in both Hobbit and LotR.  Much, much more.

What does this have to do with me?

Well, whereas Tolkien wrote from 1914 all the way until his death in 1973, I started writing Lords of Kobol in 2009.  My efforts to organize and catalogue changes for Special Edition are much less monumental than Christopher's.  Still, it can seem daunting at times.  Here's a look at what files are open on my PC at any given moment:

Click to embiggen

On the far left, there's the LoK SE docx file.  I use the split-view so I can read a chapter up top and then type my commentary in the bottom portion.  I'm bookmarking and hyperlinking to and from the commentary as I go.  Note that the page length is currently nearing 1,200 pages.  About seventy of that is commentary, thus far.

In the center, that's the "LoK.doc" file.  The first draft of all three books in one.  Created in September '09 and finished in March '10 (six months ... which I still find hard to believe).

Bottom right is the "LoK discards" file.  It includes chapters written for subsequent drafts that went unpublished and even a couple of chapters that were published and got removed.

Top right is a series of PDFs.  Note the tabs: each one is a different version of Book One published across the last decade and change.  (I occasionally published a new version of the book a couple of times each year, but that was often to add links to another book of mine or to update website links and the like.)  This way, I can see that one chapter was present in 2011 when the book was first published, but that it's missing in 2014.  At that point I have to figure out why I removed it ...

(Not pictured: image viewer, which I have open so I can check maps and such.)

I created the SE file a few months ago, pasting in all five books.  Then I returned to Colonies briefly to write that one-off chapter detailed in the previous blog post.  Last week, I came back to the SE to organize things and I made the fully linked table of contents.  Over this past weekend, I started reading and commentating in earnest.  

We seem to be on track for that December release date.

Thanks for reading.