[B5JMS] Is "Supreme Power" going anywhere?...

[b5jms at cs.columbia.edu]

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From: jmsatb5 at aol.com (Jms at B5)
Date: 30 Dec 2003 07:36:04 GMT

>Also, a friend of mine has refused to read comics for years.  I convinced
>her to read the first issue by appealling to her "Babylon 5" fandom, and
>she's hooked.  (In fact, she's debating whether to buy the trade
>paperbacks, or hold out for the hardcovers.)

...there's gonna be hardcovers?

One other thing on Supreme Power...if you remember the original miniseries that
Mark did, he had Hyperion undertaking a fairly massive endeavor to try and set
the world to rights (as he saw it, at least, which put him at odds with
others).  Mark took kind of a plot oriented approach to getting him to that
point.

Without tipping my hand too much...I wanted to try a different way of getting
someone to a point like that.  He's going to make some very bad decisions down
the road, but I want that road to be absolutely plausible and understandable. 
If you know where Hyperion came from, and what he has gone though, you come
away with full understanding of why he might do what he might do.  I want
readers to be able to go deeper inside Hyperion's mind than in any other book,
to have an intimate familiarity with his background and how it will affect his
actions.

Ironically, in so doing, I made a decision early on not to do any interior
dialogue or monologue.  You never hear his thoughts, ever.  (The one sort-of
exception I made was when he dives into the water looking for his folks, and
you hear "mom? dad?" and it could be a thought or spoken.)  In this way, you
keep what he's really thinking a mystery...and that makes him a bit more
ominous, I think.  You don't really know how much he knows, or suspects, of
what's going on around him, and how he's being used.

It's a challenging book to write, but I'm really quite happy with the result.

 jms

(jmsatb5 at aol.com)
(all message content (c) 2003 by synthetic worlds, ltd., 
permission to reprint specifically denied to SFX Magazine 
and don't send me story ideas)