Back to what I like best

I was talking with a friend of mine a few months ago. We got to talking about the various books we had done in the past. The talk went to ideas for books, and I told him my idea for a book, "The Lost in Space Encyclopedia." Somehow or another, the conversation grew and grew, and what started as "I had this idea for a book" turned into "We are going to do this book." For good measure, we decided to reprint a Lost in Space fan classic: "The Alpha Control Reference Manual."

I enjoy every aspect of doing a book. I just got the covers for both books laid out. It's kind of hard to believe that in a few months those images on my computer screen will be real, printed books (with full color covers no less!). In the bad old days (10 years ago), you had to use a scissors and rubber cement to put a book together, and color printing was murderously expensive. Now, you can just send a book to a printer on a CD ROM, and color printing (at least for the cover) is within very reasonable price ranges.

The Encyclopedia came about from watching Lost in Space episodes. There are a tremendous amount of facts about the characters, the equipment on the Jupiter 2, the science of the Lost in Space universe, and so on. I watched every episode of the show, and wrote down everything that was mentioned. As an example, I wrote down that that two headed monster Dr. Smith saw was identified by him as a type of skunk cabbage. I lookerd up images of skunk cabbage on the web. If Dr. Smith thought that creature was skunk cabbage, then he must have been indulging in some very wishful thinking indeed!

Work on the Alpha Control Reference Manual is just about finished. Entries on the Encyclopedia have to be categorized and alphabetized. It's fun for me, doing fiddly stuff like that.

One thing that those who haven't had anything published might find strange: you can look at a book on your computer screen every day for a year. You accept it as it is. But it's still a thrill to open that box of newly printed books and thumb through what you have created. And, of course, typos that didn't appear on your computer screen magically appear once the book is printed.