The Origin of Dr. Maddox

My senior year of college, I wrote my first full-length manuscript that wasn't seaQuest fanfic (which I had written at 13). It was called Metropolis and based on a live action roleplaying game I was in of the same name. It was the second manuscript I tried to get published, after the seaQuest one, and it was rejected, even after many, many revisions.

Since I now have an agent, he's kinda obligated to look at my work no matter what it is, and he said he would take a look of I did another revision (I'm easily on my 10th now), because my previous agent (who retired) had looked at it and said there were structural problems that needed revising, and she was probably right. This was all a few days before my trip to Israel, so the first real thing I did after emerging from a jetlagged haze was open the file again and read it with fresh eyes, not having looked at the thing for I'd say 3 years.

It's bad. It's not terrible, but it's not good, or it's not good enough and the amount of work I would have to put in to make it something I would actually want to publish is, uh, really not worth the effort. I would be much more successful at writing something new, I think, it having been over 10 years since I first wrote it and my writing having improved considerably since then. I am bummed about it, because it has potential and a lot of great ideas, but I think it's time to permanently retire Metropolis.

Anyway, there's a character in the book called Dr. Rutherford Tejai, who was played by my friend Jonathan in the game. Jonathan isn't excessively tall as Dr. Maddox is described as being, but he has that black bushy hair, and he did when he played Dr. Rutherford, so that was how I described him in the book, and somehow in my mind when I tried to envision Dr. Maddox six years later, I envisioned Jonathan, without knowing it, as Dr. Rutherford. The characters have nothing to do with one another (Dr. Maddox isn't a clone doc-on-demand and member of the elite Tejai corporation), but they look very similar in my head. The height is the only real difference, and I didn't realize that until today. Man, I even steal from myself.