Exordium: From Star Wars to Epublishing

From Sherwood Smith on the Book View Cafe blog:

It’s the summer of 1977.

The buzz along our apartment building in Hollywood is that Star Wars is better than it sounds. I’m thinking, gheck. Except for the Salkind Three Musketeers movie, I loathed seventies films, especially the sf ones: either they were fight-the-monster movies, or else long, boring screeds in which the furniture was plastic, and everyone wore these jump suits that looked like they’d take an hour to get out of if you wanted to pee.

This one (Star WARS? Oh please)  sounded like car-crash derby only with space ships.

...

We get out at two a.m. (we’d miraculously gotten into the midnight showing), passed the enormous line waiting for the next showing, and Dave grins at me and says “Well?”

 

“I’m going back.”

And we did. We did for about six weeks, every weekend, and then we said, “We can do that.” So we got together one evening (I still have the notes) and wrote down all the elements that we loved in fiction that had been missing from movies for years, that Star Wars was tapping into, and we wrote down every extravagant swashbuckling trope we adored and wanted in a story, came up with Exordium, our space opera extravaganza.

I grin every time I hear this story. Dave is my husband, Dave Trowbridge, and today is his debut as a member of Book View Cafe (and the second Exordium book, Ruler of Naught, is now available!)

From Sherwood and Dave on John Scalzi's The Big Idea:

Ruler of Naught is Book Two of our space opera Exordium, which began life as a mini-series screenplay over twenty years ago, morphed into a mass-market paperback, and is returning again as an e-book series.

E-books are not only giving new writers an alternative to traditional book publishing, but letting oldsters like us resurrect yellowing paperbacks from used-book crypts. That’s a fun process (mostly), but from Exordium’s beginning we’ve struggled with the skiamorphs (shadow shapes—like wood grain on plastic) that are left not only when you move between media, but when your twenty-year-old vision of a technology’s cultural impact collides with present-day reality.