About a month ago, I was completing a project and attempting to publish it via Amazon's KDP when I hit the unexpected snag of Kindle needing to know who the translator was for the edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea I had transcribed from. The idea of the project wasn't a complete transcription, although it had originally been intended to be a partial one, and the rest of the story completely rewritten or cherrypicked, as I had determined, when I read the book five years earlier, that I liked the parts without Captain Nemo best.
Well, I didn't know the translator, and Kindle didn't like that, so the book was left unpublished. I had transcribed only to the point Pierre Aronnax and company discover the Nautilus, and as yet are unaware of its true nature, much less its chief occupant. I'm not sure Jules Verne really nailed the shape of Nemo's role, but I loved the opening act as the mystery of the Nautilus unfolds, a kind of lost coda to the great age of maritime exploration last represented by Moby-Dick, so that's what I chose to feature in my version, and that alone.
Then I decided to tackle the idea from a different vantage point. Kindle has recently launched Vella, a serialized storytelling venture, and that's one thing I can always make time for, so last week I launched a revised version that features entirely original writing, a parallel narrative recapping the Verne tale and a modern sequel in which a descendant of Aronnax, a deteriorating Nautilus resting in his backyard, decides to undertake one last adventure.
I don't know how often I'll be plugging away at this, maybe once a week or so, which is the pace, at two weeks, I have set, but you can keep up with the results here. I also don't know how long it'll be, and I haven't attempted to prepare a full outline. At times such things can feel like both blessing and curse, as I have discovered with other current projects. I know the shape of it, thanks in part to half being drawn from existing material, as well as the probable conclusion to the original material.
Should be interesting.
