Trot of Oz, part II

from the diary: “Saturday 7/4/87

“Oz convention this coming Friday! Less than week! Heavens. … Dint go to beach party Jeff invited me to. Instead wrote chapter eleven of Trot of Oz. My final chapter! Yay! Wrote it all today. Tentatively titled, ‘A Battle of Giants’. Ooh. Give it to Eric. He can figure out how to end it. He’s s’posed to anyway.”

7/5: “Typed some of Trot’s Chap. 11. Now titled, ‘The Rise of Rottug’. Not a better title I guess, but not much worse.”

Eric and I traded chapters. I wrote Trot of Oz Chapter One, he wrote Chapter Two, etc. In an earlier DIR post I mention Trot. It seems I noted its genesis in 1982. I had forgotten it took five years to work our way through it. More than five years, I guess, as Eric still had to write the concluding chapter.

I knew I had to tie up a lot of the dangling plot threads in the penultimate chapter. And I had to make it exciting! The second to the last chapter is the climax, the last chapter the denouement, the summing up, the closure. Eric had done an ambitious chapter or two limning Shroom society (the Shrooms lived in a city in a cavern under Oz’s Lake Quad) and I thought I ought to step up with something comparable.