Time to get down to business.  I have an ambitious week planned for my writing, one which I hope will propel me forward, and lead to serious progress on a number of long-standing projects.  Wish me luck, and here we go…

Pathfinder

The science of Pathfinder has been firmly established at this point.  I’ve made great strides in world-building, and have a better idea of where humanity stands in 2094.  Now, I need to focus on the real challenge.  Now, I must focus on the people of 2094.  Specifically, the key characters in my story.

In last week’s Writer’s Desk, I mentioned my need to get to know my main character, Randall Holmes.  However, upon further reflection, that’s only a small part of the task ahead.  The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to feel that too many of the main characters in Pathfinder are painfully one-dimensional.  I need to get into who these people really are, and in some cases that might involve ditching more than one of them.

While hard science fiction is generally not as character-driven as soft sci-fi, the action still revolves around people.  To this point, I feel I’ve approached Pathfinder with a somewhat Clarke-esque encyclopedic bent.  While the geopolitics of Earth in the late-21st century are important for the story, readers today will be far more interested in what’s happening to the small ensemble of main characters I’ve created.

Overall, I feel good about the actual crew of the Pathfinder 7 spacecraft (which is good, as they will be Holmes’s companions for most of the story).  Other supporting characters, however, will likely need to be reworked, and some might not make the final cut.

First things first, however: I need to work on Holmes himself.  To that end, I plan to begin rewriting the first chapter of the story this week, and continuing on from there to see where it leads me.  In order to allow character development to flow as it did with Wide Horizon, I may, for the time being, simply skip planned interludes showing what’s going on back on Earth.  Instead, I’ll simply write straight through, following the events surrounding the crew on their mission to Vega.  As such, I may instead write the interludes as a separate story (which, in effect, they are).  Afterwards, I can insert the interlude pieces where appropriate.

It really is rather aggravating that I didn’t come up with this sooner.  In retrospect, part of the reason I’ve found writing Pathfinder so difficult is because I’ve essentially been trying to write two completely different (albeit loosely related) stories at once.

Wide Horizon

As I’ve done all I feel I can with Wide Horizon at this point, I’ve decided to attempt a second round of beta reading.  This week, I’ll be contacting a few of my original beta readers to offer them a chance to read the edited manuscript.  While I’ll admit I’m doing this partly to pass the time before a final editing pass (idle hands and all that), I’m also very curious to see what readers think of the changes I’ve made.

My regular readers will know that, over the course of editing late last year, I made substantial changes to my debut novel.  Most of those changes dealt with character building, and relationships between said characters.  I feel very good about the changes made; I feel they’ve resulted in a deeper, more engaging story, one that will help the reader to form a stronger bond with the characters, to care about what they do and want to see them win (or fail, as the case may be).

That, of course, is my opinion, and in the end, if I’m planning to publish this novel my opinion matters little.  I really need to know what my readers think, and I feel the best way to gauge the success of my editing is to see how readers who’ve read the previous version of the story respond to the new content.  I’m eager to receive their feedback.

Short Fiction

Now and then, I can’t help but feel a bit self conscious about the number of unfinished projects I have lying about.  There’s always a rush that accompanies the conclusion of a project, finally being able to write “The End”.  It’s a little sense of accomplishment: maybe it isn’t published, maybe it isn’t even good.  But good or not, I’ve done something.  I saw it through to the end, and I finished it.

I have a lot of unfinished project right now.  Some, like The Spaceman and I am 1, are very near to being finished (they’ll need revising, to be sure, but still).  While it feels good to make serious progress on a story that’s barely been started, I feel the burning need to have another finished project.  It doesn’t help that, at this point, I’ve nearly exhausted submission targets for my existing manuscripts.  No doubt the literary world would benefit from seeing something new.

As I said, I have a busy week ahead.  But I feel up to it; I’ve enjoyed getting back to my writing, and I’d really like to start putting myself out there again.  Wish me luck, dreamers. – MK