Hello again, dreamers.  It’s been a tough slog getting back into things, but I feel at last I’m making progress, most notably on my work in progress, Pathfinder.  Much remains to be done, however, as I have a long way to go before I can clip through Pathfinder at the pace I took with Wide Horizon.  Still, I feel good about the way things are going.  Here’s what’s in store this week:

Pathfinder

We begin, as I always seem to these days, with Pathfinder.  The more I work back into the story, the more it feels I have to do.

Upon reflection, I’ve found that one of my biggest hangups with this story is my continued, futile insistence on comparing my experience in writing it to Wide Horizon.  My recollection of writing Wide Horizon, especially in the early days, is of a very pleasant experience.  It just flowed, almost effortlessly, and at my peak I was churning out roughly a chapter a night.  As the average chapter length in Wide Horizon was ten pages, single-spaced, that’s a staggering word output.  Everything seemed to go so smoothly.

As such, I’ve been more than a little hard on myself since taking up Pathfinder in earnest.  But that, in retrospect, is a very unfair comparison, starting with the fact that most of Wide Horizon was written before I began my master’s program, much less started building a career.

It’s difficult to express just how terribly different the two stories are.  The obvious difference lies in their nature: while Wide Horizon was an almost fanciful work of soft sci-fi, Pathfinder is hard sci-fi, and I’ve taken pains to keep the story firmly grounded in accepted science.  Not only that, but Pathfinder is set in the not-so-distant future: a time close enough to the present that current global trends must be taken into account.  As such, it stands to reason that writing Pathfinder would be a slower, more labor-intensive process.  I’ve compiled innumerable pages of notes, on everything from cultural background to setting treatments of real-world locations to technological specifications, some of which pertain to spacecraft that exist within the universe of the story but may not actually appear in the story itself.

But there’s more than that.  When I began writing Wide Horizon, the concept of the story stood as one of my oldest, best-developed story ideas.  I’d had years to think carefully on exactly how the story would go.  I had a ready stable of well-developed characters, most of whom required only a small measure of tweaking to fit them into the narrative.  I had a firm idea of where I was going: of the story’s progression, major milestones, the climax and ultimately the conclusion.  And whenever I ran into gaps in the story, because it was all so well-thought out, I was able to easily craft new plot elements, even new characters on the fly, because I knew the story and its framework so well.

While the series of novels I intend to launch with this new story is well- established, Pathfinder itself, as I’ve stated previously, is among my most recent story ideas.  When I began writing, I had only a vague notion as to where everything was headed, the basic framework of the story, and I had a single character: my protagonist.  Quite simply, if I attempt to write Pathfinder by the same method I used with Wide Horizon, my efforts are likely doomed to failure.

I need to spend more time learning about this story: its settings, its characters, its progression.  I need to really get a feel for what I’m trying to do.  Lately I’ve been able to picture things much better, which is gratifying, but while that’s a good start, it is merely a start nonetheless.

As I keep saying, I need to take the time to do this right.  And with the final round of editing of Wide Horizon, followed by seeking publication, looming large, it’s all the more difficult to focus on the grind of fleshing out a new story.  When I began writing Wide Horizon, I did so with a single page of background notes, one I consulted infrequently.  It’s frustrating to tell myself not to just jump in and start trying to write Pathfinder, all the more frustrating because when I’m writing notes instead of actual story it’s hard to feel as though I’m actually accomplishing something, actually making clear progress.  But I need to keep my nose to the grindstone.

As such, for much of this week, I’m going to try to step back and resist the urge to just hop into my Pathfinder master file and start chugging away.  If I do, more than likely it will only lead to further frustration; the same frustration that led me away from the story twice now.  Even now, the recent frustration has led me to look almost longingly to several of my other story concepts.  I have this persistent, nagging fear that if I allow myself to be sidetracked by another project and not write Pathfinder now, I never will.  That may be a tad dramatic, but the last time I really veered away from the story I spent the better part of two years writing Wide Horizon.  Mind you, I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world, but my writing of Wide Horizon was, at least in part, intended as a proof-of-concept; a way to prove to myself that I really could write a novel, in preparation for writing the series that will begin with Pathfinder.

So, this week I plan to get back to basics.  I’ll be focusing on fleshing out my story notes on Pathfinder, developing the characters and progression, learning more about what I need to do.  I’ll also be getting back to my daily free writes; after all, that was how I managed to stretch myself out to the point where I was able to write Wide Horizon.  Everybody wants to compete in the big game, win that marathon, make the grade.  But it takes a lot of hard work, a lot of practice, to win the championship.  And it’s time for me to get to work. Keep reading, dreamers. – MK