About halfway through the rough draft of The Judgment of Elizabeth Sawyer, an idea began to incubate that merged the influences of two of my favorite authors and universe-creators, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke.  Through the lens of a really far-out science fiction story and very intense inter-character relationships, it dealt with issues like mankind's manifest destiny, God, and some potential conflicts between those two axioms.  My crazy, iconic, classic sci-fi epic is to be called The Glass War.

Immediately, I faced the question of whether to write it as a screenplay or as a novel.  Clearly, my inspiration came from the serial publishing and dime novels of the seventies and before.  While I could sense that there was hidden value in the novel argument, my impulse was to write it as a movie.  Do I need to be a character in this story?  Absolutely not.  Write it for the actors, right?

On the other hand, my marketing brain was churning away statistics on how straightforward and simple it would be to make the film if it was an already established property.  Bah!  That's no reason to write a book - better to let the images hit the screen free of preconception.  Better to let it be pure cinema, unmolested by the reader's mind.

Thanks to a blog I was reading on www.wordplayer.com, an entirely different reason for writing the book, and a far more compelling one, occurred to me today.  Writing a novel would be an entirely new approach to my career.  I've got plenty of scripts out there, ready to sell.  I've got money coming in for my first feature film.  On the other hand, I've never written a novel.  Not only am I unknown in that market - but I'm also ripe to pick up all the skills writing a novel can teach me.  Writing a novel would be good for me, and might give me a boost I can't get elsewhere.  That my story is way more marketable as a novel (just try and market a kooky dorky sci-fi movie) only accentuates this point!

After a bit of reflection and some consideration towards the characters in the story, it occurred to me that my science-fiction epic, The Glass War, would be best presented as a teen-fiction book.  On the one hand, something between 150 and 200 pages is consistent with the work Heinlein and others were doing at the height of the pulp novel's reign.  On the other hand, the story can move along at a pretty good clip at that length, and keep my attention focused.  It's not too ambitious as a first effort.  It can be efficient.

Look at all those Star Wars novellas and bits of Twilight spinoff whathaveyou...  Teen fiction is where pulp writing has run off to, and here I am with a bunch of young adult characters, being united in purpose with a central father figure.  While I never saw my story (or the film) as particularly X-Menesque, maybe the elements that hint towards that are my way into elevating a genre of writing!

Of course, this will happen in the midst of my work on Sam Bailey, Elizabeth Sawyer, a new film I'm hatching with my talented actor-neighbor, and the ever-loving SkyChasers.  At least as a novel, it gives me a different way to write.

Thanks to Devin and others for suggesting this basic approach - I just hadn't found the right place to come from.  I think maybe now I've got it.  Eureka!

Thanks also to Terry Rossio, guru of www.wordplayer.com, for his insightful blogging.