The Comment That Created a Click
If you’ve read my first post, you know I received an assertion that a book I reviewed was stolen in part from another author.
Here is the comment (reprinted with the comment author’s position) nearly* as it was presented.
*Note, I have chopped out two sections as described in brackets below.
Comment posted at 2024/04/03 at 3:43 am
An acquaintance of mine has already pointed you at the truth, a summary of which can be found at http://www.imafraidyouvegotdragons.com. But she also pointed me at your review, Jami, and I think your sincerity deserves some additional detail.
Peter Beagle is taking public credit for a story he did not create, and only partially wrote. There are a number of reasons for this. None of them, alas, are positive.
The initial genesis of the idea was a fanzine illustration I drew back in the 1970s. The caption was “They’re in the walls,” and the cartoon showed two priests, one of whom is glaring at a tiny mouse-sized dragon that he is holding up by its tail (the tiny dragon is grinning wildly at the priest, clearly not frightened at all). I thought the idea of a church infested by itty-bitty dragons had humor potential as a short story, so for the next decade I played with variations of the idea, all under the title “A Surfeit of Dragons.” By that time I was beginning to make Hollywood connections as a journalist, and no longer found the modern-day church approach to the idea particularly interesting. Instead, inspired by the book and movie of THE PRINCESS BRIDE, I changed the title to I’M AFRAID YOU’VE GOT DRAGONS and decided to play games with various fantasy and fairy tale tropes. (Making the main character a young man who had inherited the low-status job of dragon exterminator from his father, while dreaming of a very different life, was actually a holdover from the “Surfeit” period. In that earlier take the lead was a young man with no religious convictions who had inherited a dragon-infested Bay Area church from his deceased evangelical pastor father.)
By 1996 I had the basic bones of the story settled in my mind, and started pitching it around Hollywood. In some places I pitched it as live-action. In others, as animation. It depended on what that particular studio or production company did. I even pitched it as a potential musical, and discussed writing demo tracks with the amazing Sam Glaser, one of the most brilliant musicians I’ve ever known.
In 1997 I talked about collaborating on a spec DRAGONS screenplay (and maybe a novel) with Bev Bertenshaw, a writer friend whom I’d written a bunch of comedy songs with over the years. What Bev came up with in response to my story notes didn’t work for me, so we didn’t proceed together. Instead I fleshed it out myself, generating another 8000 words of detailed story development, and kept pitching the project in Hollywood on my own.
I met Peter Beagle in 2001, and took out a film option on his first book, A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE. While working on the screenplay I learned how incredibly dire Peter’s circumstances were. When he asked me to help fix them, I did. Peter was so happy with the results that he eventually asked me to become his official business manager. That wasn’t anything I’d ever planned to do with my life, but there was no denying that our respective skills dovetailed well, so over the next decade we rebuilt his career, got most of his lost rights back, and achieved a lot of success together.
One thing we did to boost his career was to secretly collaborate. Working together, we generated a lot of “Peter S. Beagle” stories — way more than the field was used to seeing. Consider these numbers…in the 45 years between 1957 and 2002, Peter wrote and sold just 15 pieces of short fiction, while between 2002 and 2014 there were 46 (!) new “Peter S. Beagle” stories. (In the last 10 years Peter has published another 10 stories, but in fact only one of them was written after 2014. The other nine were pieces he wrote on his own before 2014, some based on his own ideas and some based on mine, that we hadn’t offered for sale because we agreed that they weren’t good enough yet.)
The exact 2002-2014 short fiction tally is as follows: 12 stories that Peter wrote and I only edited; 18 stories where I made a critical creative or written contribution that was more than editing, but not enough to qualify as co-authoring (in my opinion); and 16 stories where I wrote anywhere between 20% and 80% of the final text. I also came up with 18 of the titles. Peter’s “In Your Dreams” I changed to “Dirae,” and “Untitled Monster Story” was renamed “The Best Worst Monster.” The first piece Peter called ”Dragon Story” I changed to “Oakland Dragon Blues,” while the second became “Trinity County, CA: You’ll Want To Come Again, and We’ll Be Glad To See You!” My favorite title creation adorns the Beagle story published in the Troll’s Eye View collection. Peter’s drafts were all labeled “Jack and the Beanstalk as recounted by Mrs. Eunice Giant,” but I sent it in to the publisher like this:
Up the Down Beanstalk (A Wife Remembers)
— Special to the Cumulonimbus Weekly Chronicle, as
recounted by Mrs. Eunice Giant, 72 Fairweather Lane,
East-Of-The-Bean, Sussex Overhead —
We’d been secretly writing stories together for four years by 2006, so it felt natural to tackle a novel collaboratively when the editor at Firebird Books asked Peter to submit something to her. At that point Peter didn’t have any ideas he was excited about, so I emailed him the 8,000 words of I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons plot and character notes I’d written in 1997. When he agreed that there was something worth doing there, we got started. I gave him another 2,000 words of developmental material in the form of three “story scaffold” documents (one each for Plot, Character, and Theme), and we got started.
Not surprisingly — since it wasn’t Peter’s idea and he hadn’t been thinking about the story for decades, the way I had — his early work on the book was mediocre. The project very quickly turned into one of our “mostly Connor” jobs: in this case my title and my plot, and now mainly my writing. I was responsible for 75-80% of the text in the first 11 chapters, overall, and on three or four of those chapters I wrote even more than that.
Chapter nine is a good example of how we worked. It has four scenes. Scene #1 is the diplomatic dance between Mortmain and the chamberlein. Every word of that is mine. Scene #2 is Cerise’s emotional chaos and her conversation with her mother. Peter wrote a draft for me to work from, and I wound up using some of it…but even what I kept I modified significantly. Scene #3 is Robert and his sisters at home, and once again every word is mine. Scene #4 closes the chapter with the betrothal ceremony, and most of it is mine. Just before I started it I asked Peter to send me a betrothal speech for Prince Reginald, which he did, and I used roughly half. The rest of the scene was all mine.
[Connor provided two excerpts of fiction, but I’ve removed them since I don’t have the explicit right from both authors to reprint them here.]
There’s a lot more I could share, but I’ll stop here.
I suspect this news about the creation and real authorship of DRAGONS might be upsetting, and I apologize for that. But truth is truth. Peter has been lying about who I am and what I’ve done for close to nine years now, for greedy reasons. I’m not going to let him steal the credit for my ideas and writing on top of that.
If you have any questions, I am happy to answer them via email (info@imafraidyouvegotdragons.com) or phone ([Redacted]).
All best,
Connor Cochran
Header photo from https://www.imafraidyouvegotdragons.com/.