This past May 7, with all rights once more belonging to me, I resubmitted a newly-polished manuscript under the shorter and much simpler title of Solfleet: The Call of Duty to the same major publishing company that had previously shown enough interest to comment and invite me to resubmit. My sincerest hope is that that company will choose to publish it as though it had never been published before. After all, as a military science-fiction novel it is right up their alley. Military science-fiction is what they do. I also hope that company will follow up by publishing the second book in the series, Solfleet: Beyond the Call, which I expect to have completed by the time I hear from them about the first one—I am far closer to the end than I am to the beginning. The third book, tentatively titled Solfleet: Above and Beyond, would naturally follow. Then, if all goes well, I will wrap up the series with…well, with about a dozen more books.

There are no guarantees, of course. It is very possible that the publishing company that currently has the manuscript will choose not to publish it. If that happens, then I will seek out other alternatives. Solfleet has a following. It might not be a huge following, thanks to the original publishing company’s lack of…well, pretty much everything, including professionalism…but it is a following nonetheless. Therefore, if in the end I do not find a better alternative, I will publish my Solfleet novels myself in as many digital formats as I can, so that all who want to read them will be able to do so.

I am no longer using the “multi-level” titles on the books, but in my mind they still fall into those categories. At this point in time, I already know where The Excalibur Trilogy is going and how it is going to get there. I also know how The Timeshift Saga storyline is going to end three or four books after that first trilogy. I even know how the conflict against the Veshtonn is going to end several books later, and how the entire series will end three books after that.

I have developed and outlined far too much to sit back and watch it die if the potential new publisher chooses not to publish the manuscript it currently has. So, one way or another, my entire Solfleet series will be made available to the masses.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I had made a big mistake. I had been so excited at being offered a publishing contract that I had failed to thoroughly research the company that had made me the offer. I never had to pay any fees or other costs, so I assumed the publishing company was a legitimate one, and in some ways it is. This company does not charge authors a fee. This company does publish the author’s work in book form. This company does assign an ISBN number and make the book available to all of the major wholesalers and retailers.

The publisher started by pricing the book much too high—$39.95 in United States currency. Yes, it was 662 pages long, but it was published in soft-cover form and I was a new and completely unknown author. I knew without a doubt that it would sell very few copies, relatively speaking, and I fought for months to get them to drop the price to $24.95, which I believed to be much more reasonable. The publisher eventually did drop it to $29.95—not what I wanted, but better than nothing. Unfortunately, that drop was only temporary. A few months later the publisher jacked the price back up without warning.

In addition to overpricing the book, the publisher failed to follow through with many of its promises. I will not go into details here for the simple reason that they have at least one lawyer on retainer and I do not. What I would write in this space, were I to go into details, would be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…but when has the truth ever gotten in the way of a potentially ethically-challenged lawyer arguing his or her way to victory? Suffice to say that the publisher made several promises beyond simply publishing the book and making it available, and did not follow through with any of them.

Over the next couple of years things only got worse. The publisher started running one promotion after another and inviting me to participate…for a fee. They would send my book to celebrity so-and-so…for a fee. They would display my book at this-and-that event…for a fee. They would add my book to this-and-that list…for a fee. To this day I still have well over 100 emails from the publisher relating to those promotions. I finally had enough and decided that the publisher could take its promotions and…well, you get the idea.

On November 6, 2009 I contacted the publisher and requested that my rights be returned to me, explaining my reasons for making the request. I admit that I was not as polite as I could have been in that communication, but I was angry. Not surprisingly, the publisher completely ignored that communication, so six days later I contacted them again. I advised them that I knew they had received my communication because their system had auto-replied and confirmed receipt, and then asked them if they simply intended to ignore me. I also asked them to let me know if they were looking into the matter because as angry as I was, I still wanted to give them a reasonable amount of time to respond. The publisher ignored that communication as well. I contacted them a third time on December 12, 2009 and repeated my request to be released from my contract, and asked them to please respond. Once again, the publisher ignored me. Finally, on April 4, 2010, I contacted the publisher one more time and demanded that my rights be returned to me immediately, advising them that that was the last time I was going to ask nicely. As they had three times before, they ignored that communication as well. Strike three-plus-one. They were out. I decided to file suit for breach of contract.

I do not know if the publisher got wind of the fact that I actually was going forward with a suit, or if they just got tired of hearing from me, but on January 6, 2011 I received an email from them in which they offered to sell my rights back to me. My first reaction was to experience a sudden and very primitive desire to go to their offices and blow them up. Fortunately, that desire faded quickly—I’m really not a violent person—and I sat down to think things over. I could refuse to give those lying sleaze-bag killers of authors’ dreams a single cent, haul their collective butts into court, thoroughly crucify their shady character to the best of my ability, and then maybe win my rights back. Or, I could just buy my rights back and be done with them forever.

I bought my rights back that same day, and the book officially went out of print. The fact that I gave that company money still irks me sometimes, but the buy-back fee was really not very much, and having avoided the hassle of a long, drawn-out legal battle makes it worth the price.

As an unpublished author I did not have an agent, and I suspected that as an unpublished author I was not likely to find a reputable one if I tried to, so I decided not to bother trying. Instead, I decided that I would submit my manuscript to various publishers directly. But to which publishers, and how?

I went to my local bookstore and wrote down the names of all the publishing companies that had books on the science fiction shelves—Ace, Tor, Baen, Daw, and several others. Then I went home and looked up every one of those companies on the Internet, found their websites, and read their submission guidelines. I discovered that some of them would only accept manuscripts submitted by literary agents. Since I did not have an agent, I crossed those companies off the list. When I finished, three names remained.

Though similar, those companies’ guidelines did differ in some ways. One thing that all three had in common, however, was that they did not want concurrent submissions. I was unsure as to whether that meant that they did not want submissions that had also been submitted to other publishers, or that they did not want more than one submission at a time from any one author. Being a new and unpublished author, I decided to err on the side of caution and not risk upsetting anyone. I submitted my manuscript to one publisher at a time.

I submitted my manuscript to the first of those publishers on October 23, 2002. Just over a month later, on November 29, I received a very professional and polite rejection. Refusing to grow discouraged, I prepared my manuscript for the second publisher and submitted it on December 16, 2002. This time the turnaround was much longer, but on June 27, 2003 I received another rejection letter. Refusing once more to give up, I prepared and submitted my manuscript to the third publisher two days later, and fifteen months later, on October 2, 2004, a representative of that publisher—I believe associate editor was the person’s title—notified me that my manuscript was good, and was being passed up to the next level. A real editor liked my manuscript! It was being passed up to a higher level!

And there was much rejoicing.

I eagerly awaited the next communication. I knew my story was good, but I could hardly believe that in an industry that is so difficult to break into, my manuscript…my manuscript…had made the first cut at a major publishing company! Then on December 30, 2004, I received another rejection. However, that rejection was different. The letter didn’t simply take a paragraph to say, “no thank you,” the way the others had. This rejection gave me much more. It stated that although my manuscript had been rejected in its current form, it was both well-written and deserving of detailed feedback. Naturally, I was disappointed at having been rejected again, but this particular rejection had brought with it a spark of hope. Someone who worked at a higher level for a major publishing company, presumably one of the editors, had told me that my manuscript was well-written.

I read the feedback with enthusiasm. The editor questioned two relatively minor story points and made suggestions as to how best to address those points, and then addressed one very important matter relating to storytelling on a large scale. I saw the editor’s point very clearly and agreed completely. Filled with the hope that the “well-written” comment had instilled in me, I contacted the publisher and asked them if they would be willing to reconsider my manuscript if I addressed those areas of concern. On January 17, 2005 the publisher responded to my inquiry with a pleasingly enthusiastic invitation to resubmit, which I have since been told by others is a rare occurrence.

I addressed the areas of concern, the most important of which required that I add a significant amount of material in order to tell a more complete story in the first book than I had told up to that point. Ten months later, on November 19, 2005, I resubmitted my newly expanded 875-page manuscript to the publisher. Then I waited…and waited…and waited.

When nearly a year had passed and I hadn’t heard from the publisher—this was a resubmission, so I expected the process to flow much faster than it had the first time around—I contacted them, but I received no response. I learned much later that they had good reason for their silence, but at the time I was unaware of what they were going through internally, so did not understand their silence. Like any aspiring author in my position likely would have, I started growing impatient. I really wanted that specific company to publish my manuscript, but how long was I expected to wait? I started looking for alternatives, and I soon found one…unfortunately.

I stumbled across a website that belonged to a company that I had never heard of. I browsed the site, read up on the company on that site, and reviewed the submission guidelines very carefully. The company promised a relatively quick response which was exactly what I was looking for, so on November 10, 2006 I submitted my manuscript to them, telling myself that I would have to be patient because its length would likely force the publisher to take more time than advertised to review and consider it.

And then it happened. On December 14, 2006 I received word from the new publisher that they wanted to publish my manuscript. I was elated. I had always believed in my story. I had always believed in myself. Now a second publishing company believed in me as well. I went through the contracting process with the new publisher and notified the one I had been waiting on for so long that I had signed with someone else, and in April 2007 my first Solfleet novel was published and released.

With a new concept and a definite direction and goal—not to mention a great new major character, courtesy of my younger brother—I dove back into the deep end. I wrote for hours and hours whenever I could—day after day, week after week, month after month. As I made the changes and incorporated nearly all of the the ideas that I had written down in my side notes, my 360+ page manuscript grew…and grew…and grew. When it grew to exceed 1,000 pages I came to realize that I was going to have to break it into two books, and when it grew to exceed 1,300 pages those two books became three, and the premiere trilogy was formed.

Of course, breaking one story into a trilogy means having to tell three complete stories. The original story would play out over the three volumes, but each book had to tell a story and come to some kind of conclusion as well. For this reason, when I finally finished the initial rewrite, I had to go back and determine what individual story each book would tell.

Five years after Pocket Books rejected my Star Trek novel—five years after I began to remove the Star Trek elements and write my own creation—I completed the manuscript for the first book of the Solfleet trilogy. The time had come to consider names—to christen it with an awesome title. I thought long and hard about that, knowing that once a company published it, if a company published it, it would have that title forever.

It was the first of three books that formed a trilogy. All of my planned stories—there were about thirty at the time—centered on Solfleet the way the various incarnations of Star Trek centered on Starfleet, so “Solfleet” would be part of the title. Somewhere from six to eight books would relate to the time-travel mission, so “Timeshift” would be part of the title as well, and since that many books could be considered a saga, I decided that “The Timeshift Saga” would work well. Wanting three individual book titles that would both emphasize duty and honor and tie the three books together, I came up with “The Call of Duty”, “Beyond the Call of Duty”, and “Above and Beyond the Call of Duty”, which seemed to accomplish that goal perfectly. Finally, I needed a title for the trilogy itself, or so I thought at the time, and since the starcruiser Excalibur was pivotal to the entire plot, “The Excalibur Trilogy” seemed to be the logical choice.

All of that fine logical reasoning led me to christen the first book Solfleet: The Timeshift Saga: The Call of Duty: Book One of the Excalibur Trilogy. It was official. My 582-page manuscript for the first Solfleet book had a title nearly as long as the manuscript itself, but at the time I loved it. All I had to do was find a publisher to put it out there.

To say that I was disappointed when Pocket Books rejected my awesome new Star Trek story would be an understatement. Ten years of work had been utterly trivialized and discarded, allegedly without even being read first. My two best friends in the world had read it loved it. I knew that at least one of them had given me the completely objective opinion that I had asked for because he had thoroughly dissected an earlier draft and pointed out several flaws that I, being so close to it, had missed. Another friend who lived a few townhouses down from mine had read it and loved it. My younger brother had read it and…and had asked me why I put my story in the Star Trek universe. He had liked it as well, but in his inherently subjective but purportedly objective opinion, the story was bursting at the seams with potential and the Star Trek universe was only holding it back.

I thought about my brother’s opinion. I thought about the fact that throughout the entire process of writing my story in the Star Trek universe I had written dozens if not hundreds of notes about ideas that I’d had for my story that simply could not work in the Star Trek universe. I thought about how much I would really hate to throw away ten years’ worth of work. After I did all of that thinking, I decided to start over. I would remove the Star Trek elements and rewrite my story, putting it in a future Earth universe of my own creation. I would incorporate those ideas that would not fit into Star Trek. Starfleet would become Solfleet. Earth would not be the utopian world that Gene Roddenberry had made it. The Federation would become the Coalition and would not be founded or centered on Earth.

I contacted my brother and told him what I planned to do. He told me that he was glad to hear it, and then asked me if I might have any use for a character whom he had created for one of his own projects, but had not worked out as he had hoped. He explained that he had tried later to use the character in one or two other projects as well, but that the character had simply refused to fit in anywhere to a satisfactory degree. I asked my brother to describe the character to me. He did, and I told him that I might indeed have a role for him. In a manner of speaking, I then gave the character an audition. Admiral Icarus Hansen lived.

When I decided to write about where Solfleet came from, my intent was to write a relatively long but not ridiculously long post about it. Five and a half hours and more than 3,100 words later, I finished drafting it. Realizing that no one would read it, I have broken it into five parts. Beginning this evening, a.k.a. right now, I will post a new part each evening until all five parts have been posted. Here is the first:

Back in 1986 I had an idea for a story—a science fiction adventure story that would take place on multiple worlds and in the deep space between them…and in multiple periods of time. I was serving as a U.S. Army Military Police Investigator at the time and had recently been stationed at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I was assigned, essentially as an internal affairs investigator inside the prison. I had tried everything I could think of to get out of that assignment, but nothing had worked. I had my orders. I was stuck there. I needed the distraction…badly.

As I worked on the manuscript over the next few years—I took a sixteen week break in 1987 to attend the Army’s Criminal Investigations school, after which the Army transferred me to Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana—I had a difficult time deciding whether to write about a future Earth, or about a group of fictional worlds and civilizations somewhere out there in the cosmos. If I wrote about a future Earth I could possibly put my story into the Star Trek universe. I was a lifelong Star Trek fan, after all, so that possibility carried with it a certain appeal. However, if I wrote about some other worlds far off in the cosmos, I wouldn’t have to concern myself with being accurate with the details of Earth’s “neighborhood”, i.e. what stars are where and how far away, etcetera. I flip-flopped back and forth many times while I wrote, which slowed my progress immensely.

I left the Army in 1990 and moved back to the suburbs of Philadelphia, where I had grown up, and kept on plugging away at that manuscript that seemed as though it was just going to keep going, on and on and on. Another year, and then another, flip-flopping back and forth—Earth’s future, another place, Earth’s future, another place. Hey, another place had worked great for George Lucas, so why couldn’t it work for me?

Then, somewhere along the way, a little something called Star Trek: Deep Space Nine found its way to my television screen. I had already given thought, many times, to the fact that the original Star Trek series’ Guardian of Forever would fit into my story very well, as would some of the events that had been portrayed in Star Trek: The Next Generation, such as the introduction of Guinan, the encounters with the Borg, and many others. Finally, after working on the story for years, I made my decision. My story would begin 20+ years after the events of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the first few seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and the Guardian of Forever would provide the time travel that the story required.

I was officially writing a Star Trek novel!

I wrote like a man completely possessed. I wrote after work. I wrote after church…if I went. On Saturday’s I wrote for twelve, fourteen, sometimes sixteen straight hours. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote…and I finished! I actually finished! It was late 1996 (as best I can recall), and I had finally finished! I immediately printed it, packaged it, and sent it off to Pocket Books to be published, as they were (and I believe still are) the only publisher licensed to publish Star Trek books. It had taken me ten years to write, but it had been worth it! I had created a masterpiece! The good folks at Pocket Books were going to love it! They were going to publish it! So what if no one had ever heard of me! So what if I had never sold a written work before! As far as I knew at the time, David Gerrold had never sold anything and no one had heard of him prior to “The Trouble With Tribbles”, and look what had happened for him! So why not me, too?

Nine months later, in the summer of 1997, I received…a rejection. Not only that, but also the manuscript that I had sent in, allegedly unopened and unread. I say ‘allegedly’ for reasons that I will not go into here in any detail. Suffice to say that a few of my story elements later showed up in Star Trek: Voyager. Remember the lawsuit involving Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5? Enough said.