So I put
"Double Click" away once more and went back to writing the video
game strategy guides I'd found my way into to pay the rent, and
that was the end of that...
For about six months, anyway.
Then I was struck by an idea: To rewrite "Double Click" just one
more time, but this time around, fix the number one complaint
that editors had voiced: That the story was too dated. So instead
of playing out the trials and tribulations of my characters on a
stage set in the by-now commonplace (and therefore, predictable)
personal and mainframe computer market, I decided to shift the
backdrop to a more modern setting: advanced handheld computers
and pocket communicators, also known as PDAs, or personal digital
assistants.
I told my agent none of this, and quietly set to reworking the
plot and backdrop to accommodate my change of heart. To make the
story feel fresh to me I changed most of the characters names,
but other than that each of their stories and struggles remained
the same. To ensure that I didn't date the story before I even
finished it, I wove in a number of not quite ready for prime time
technologies, including practical speech synthesis and voice
recognition. The final rewrite in effect put the novel ever so
slightly into the future, and as far as I could tell squashed
the criticism that the story was too stale.
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