Hoping for a happy ending

Looks like there's been a bit of confusion at Pocket following the layoff of editor Margaret Clark, a few months after the layoff of editor Marco Palmieri. David McIntee was told his proposal for an Abramsverse novel focusing on Scotty, which he'd worked on with Margaret, had been sent off to John Van Citters at CBS licensing for approval. And then Margaret lost her job. And David didn't hear anything, until Greg Cox announced on TrekBBS that he's doing the book David thought he was doing.

This sort of thing should usually be happening quietly out of view of the fans; we're generally told it isn't any of our business. But we're used to hearing regularly from Trek editors. John Ordover and Marco were both regulars on the Trek boards; Margaret didn't appear nearly as often, but she still posted occasionally. All we know now is that Pocket still has a couple of editors on staff who've done some Trek books. We haven't heard from them, we haven't heard how responsibilities for the books will shake out, and we haven't heard whether there may be any changes to the lineup of books Margaret announced for the rest of 2009 and 2010; there were, after all, some changes when Marco was laid off.

But now we're seeing at least one writer getting lost in the shuffle. Someone at Pocket has evidently dropped the ball. (ETA: it's been suggested that the ball was dropped before the shuffle; if the editors still there didn't know about this, they're free of any blame, and, more importantly, that things may improve.) I just hope there's a way to resolve this to everyone's satisfaction.

Footnote: in that Unreality SF roundtable on Pocket Books and Star Trek XI, Jens Deffner asked the participants who we'd like to see writing in the Abrams timeline novels. Part of my response: "I'd be curious to see what someone like David McIntee, who's done some action-oriented Doctor Who novels, could do with this more action-oriented Star Trek." I'm still curious.