Beaver Papers: The Sequel

So it's turning out to be simply too big a job to pull together an "expanded edition" for The Beaver Papers' 30th anniversary ebook reissue, as we were originally planning. Just proofing the original and doing the whole ebook-format learning curve is going to make it hard enough just to bring the original bookout next month as planned. Given that, we've decided that the 30th Anniversary Edition will consist only of the original book, with two new scripts, a new introduction, and some corrections of fact (or what passes for "fact" in the reality of The Beaver Papers), sold for a lower-than-planned $2.99.

      Which means we'll be saving the unpublished scripts we were gathering for the "expanded" edition—and coming up with a whole bunch more—for The Beaver Papers 2. Thirty years ago, when The Beaver Papers was new and doing well in the stores, we talked about writing a sequel...but life moved on and we never got to it. Now, almost by accident, we're finally doing it. 

       So far we know it'll include faux Leave It to Beaver script treatments by Ayn Rand, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jim Thompson, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, W. Somerset Maugham, J. G. Ballard, John Updike, Jorge Luis Borges, and at least 15 others. Along with the story of what happened during "the Autumn of the Beaver," when the cast and crew fought to bring the show back to life after the heart-rending cancellation described at the end of the original book. It should be out in less than a year.
       Oh, and there will be a sneak preview of two of the scripts from the sequel in the Anniversary Edition next month: Beaver in the Rye by J. D. Salinger and Do Beavers Dreams of Electric Creeps? by Philip K. Dick. That'll give you a chance to see if we've gotten better or worse at this parody thing in the past three decades.

       Better or worse, we've had a great time going back to that long-ago idea and bringing it back to life for our current selves. I really wasn't sure we'd have it in us when we started, but whatever drove us to write the thing in the first place is apparently still alive in us. I guess sometimes you can go home again.

        (Actually, that's someone we haven't parodied yet: Thomas Wolfe. Look Homeward, Beaver?)