Getting back into the swing of things has been a slow, at times frustrating process, a fact which I’ve made no secret of.  Surprisingly, one of the hardest things to get back to has been my long-standing weekly posts: Writer’s Desk, The Junk Drawer (which would normally be posted today), and Short Story Saturday.  After all, after a day where I’ve sat down to write and the words just didn’t come, it seems pointless to try to grunt out an entire 1000-word plus post essentially saying I’ve nothing new to report.  Not only that, but it feels somewhat self-defeating to me, while serving only to waste my readers’ time.  Yet, it’s this former weekly post that’s been the hardest to resurrect.

As with my other regular weekly posts, the Weekly Update was born during a period when I was still writing Wide Horizon.  It was a time when, safe to say, glimpses into my writing were far more interesting: there was always something new.  Not only was I plying my way steadily through my first draft of my debut novel, but I was also setting aside time each week to work on both my short fiction and various side projects.  Imagine: I actually needed a break from my work-in-progress.  I actually needed to force myself, two days a week, to work on something else.  Well, since the conclusion of my first draft of Wide Horizon, my output has dropped considerably.  Over the past few years I’ve had spikes, yes, yet the period in which I was most productive was the several months at the tail end of last year when I was editing Wide Horizon.  My Weekly Update post was originally intended not only to keep my readers apprised of what I was up to, but also as a means of maintaining accountability; the way I saw it, having to report on my progress each week was a way to keep my output going steady.

There are few things more deflating than making a post each week essentially reporting that I’ve accomplished very little, if anything, over the past week.  But this week, after months of frustration, finally that has changed.  Over the coming weeks, I plan to continue ramping up my output, writing more and more and getting back into mid-season form, as it were.  However, I’m pleased to say that the new approach I’d announced in my recent post, “When We Left Earth”, is already yielding results.  Things are changing.  I’m finally, truly waking up.

All my life I have been a naturally compulsive person.  I like routine; I find it comforting.  As such, perhaps it’s safe to say that it’s harder for me to admit that what I’m trying to do isn’t working than it might be for most people.  But change, as they say, is good.  And while that may not always be true, even when change isn’t necessarily good, it can still be necessary.  As such, at least for the time being, I’m going to be shelving my Junk Drawer posts, at least partially.  While such posts may pop up, they will be posted infrequently.  It’s time to make changes, and I do believe those changes will be for the better.  On that note, here’s what I was up to this week:

Samarkand

Freeing myself to explore Samarkand ahead of Pathfinder has really paid off.  This week, after reading over what I’d written thus far, I threw myself into my notes, starting with character development.

And boy, was that a rewarding experience.  As I’ve mentioned, one of the virtues of Wide Horizon was its simplicity, especially its focus on a small cast of characters.  While developing the story, I was able to focus on fleshing out that small group of characters, growing them into a dynamic cast of intriguing individuals, and allowing them to form bonds organically.  While there were other, secondary characters involved with the story at times, most of them served as little more than plot devices.  And as I was fully immersed in the rich framework of the story, over time I found myself capable of crafting fairly interesting characters on the fly, calling new people into being on a whim as required to advance the story.

While the basic framework of Samarkand has been rolling around in my mind even longer than Wide Horizon, I’d never taken the time to really sit down and flesh out the individual characters required for the story, instead maintaining only a vague notion of the group as a whole.  So, when I first sat down to write Samarkand, I just tried to plow through it, creating virtually every character on the fly.

This was a bad idea, and ultimately served as a major source of the frustration that led me to repeatedly abandon the story, first for Wide Horizon, and later for Pathfinder.  So, this week I set myself to hammering out detailed character notes.  The process turned out far better than I had expected.  Before long, I came to really enjoy it.  I began to really picture these people: I started being able to see them the way I saw Braylen, and Declan, and the other characters of Wide Horizon.  I began to hear their voices, understand their backgrounds, and in doing so understand their motivations and gain a better grasp of how these individuals would interact with one another.

While such work is tedious, over time I’ve come to realize it is also crucial to creating a realistic, enjoyable story.  Without knowing a character’s background, their motivations, the experiences that have led them to where they are, it’s far too easy to simply embrace tropes and end up creating hollow characters with exaggerated personalities and canned responses.  This, in turn, leads to corny, halting dialogue, in which characters seem less like they’re having a conversation and more like they’re taking part in a really bad amateur improv act.

The bulk of my work this week revolved around what will, at first, be the core group of characters that drive the story forward: the SAB.  For those who may be unfamiliar with the story, Samarkand revolves around the men and women of the Samarkand Colonial Expedition, an ESA (Earth Space Administration) effort to establish a colony on the fourth planet of the planetary system surrounding the star Phecda (given what we currently know about star system formation, some of this information may be changed shortly).  While it is expected that the colony, once fully-established, will hold democratic elections to form a representative government, the initial work of founding the colony is to be handled by a team of experts, hand-picked by the colony’s administrator, a genial, visionary older man named David Hyde.

My breakthrough came when I began asking myself an obvious question: what qualifies these individuals for such a task?  In my concept notes, I had vaguely described the members of the SAB as “the best and brightest of a generation”, but that’s hardly enough.  What sorts of people would we choose to establish a human colony on a distant alien planet?  What sorts of skills would be required to accomplish this feat, and what would these people have to have done over the course of their respective careers to gain sufficient prestige to be chosen?

This led to a great deal of research and brainstorming (and consulting my existing notes on Pathfinder), but the results were deeply satisfying.  Gradually, a picture emerged of a very different group of people than I’d originally pictured.  Rather than being a somewhat rag-tag band of idealistic misfits, all eminently qualified in their respective fields yet somehow unlikely to be missed on Earth, the SAB now stands as a government-sponsored collection of renowned experts.  These are colossi: men and women of action, household names in their respective fields, each one’s name tied to at least one major triumph of science and infrastructure on a scale virtually incomprehensible for us today.

While obviously none of them have ever been a part of so audacious an undertaking as founding an extrasolar colony nearly 100 light-years from Earth, they have nonetheless each been involved in the sorts of projects that would make them the most qualified living individuals to take part in such an undertaking.  Among their members are eminent scientists who’ve been involved in studying alien life on distant planets and developing entire space stations devoted to producing staple crops to feed Earth’s population, as well as accomplished government bureaucrats involved in the terraforming and recolonization of Mars (an undertaking which was planned as of Pathfinder, but had not yet been carried out).

Dialogue has improved already (though I’ve started eyeing the existing dialogue more critically, suggesting early rewrites may be necessary).  But it feels good to see the characters finally coming to life, and I’m eager to see what happens next.

Pathfinder

As I’d hoped, my breakthrough in Samarkand has led to fresh ideas on Pathfinder as well.  While expanding my notes on Samarkand, by necessity I found myself referring back to my existing concept notes from Pathfinder, and over time I found myself coming up with new material for that story as well.

After spinning my wheels for nearly a year and a half, I found myself asking questions once again.  “OK, so how does this work?”  “Well, where did this guy come from?”  “So, why does she feel that way?”  It is difficult to describe the sheer elation that comes from having new ideas on a story that has stagnated for so long.  I couldn’t be happier, and I’m eager to explore these new possibilities.

One of the greatest challenges of writing the series of novels that will eventually become When We Left Earth will be that of writing a generational story.  The idealistic, hungry young researchers and bureaucrats of one story ultimately become the leaders and visionary scientists of the next, their names eventually passing into historic context in subsequent installments.  As the events of Samarkand occur a mere twenty years after the start of Pathfinder, these two stories are intricately linked; what happens in Samarkand relies on the history provided by Pathfinder for continuity, and the events of Pathfinder must be sculpted to lead inevitably to those of Samarkand.  While challenging, I’ve also found over the past week how much fun this can be.

Short Fiction

I’ve finally started breaking through with my free writes again this week.  While I’d resolved to return to free writing mostly as a means to jump-start my writing and get back into the swing of things, I’ve also found it to be a convenient outlet.  As I’ve said, one of the most frustrating aspects of dedicating myself to working on notes and world-building is the sense that, unless I’m actually writing, I’m not really accomplishing anything.  Well, thanks to my free writes, I’m able to actually write something every day, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely.

This week, after weeks of frustration I finally hit upon a story that really leaped off the page.  Here with Me began as a somewhat personal story about the sense of longing one feels when involved with someone who’s forced to travel frequently for work.  However, once I’d placed it within the framework of Pathfinder (as I’ve tried to do with many of my free writes and short fiction pieces so far this year), it quickly evolved into a deep story about the realities of love and relationships in 2094, in a world that has grown progressively smaller as evolving transportation and communications technologies have rendered distances on Earth virtually meaningless.

While I wasn’t able to complete the story last night, my inability to finish it was due to my personal schedule and not hitting a literary wall, which was a refreshing change of pace.  And as I already have a firm idea of the story’s progression and its conclusion, I’m confident that I’ll be able to knock this one out during Short Story Saturday tomorrow.  And after watching numerous projects languish for years now, it will feel good to go from basic concept to manuscript in a matter of days.

In fact, given my increased output of late, for the first time in months I’m really looking forward to Short Story Saturday tomorrow, and not only because it will give me an excuse to stop banging my head off my work-in-progress (as has been the case for the past year).  Hopefully, I’ll manage to knock out one or two long-standing projects.

Changes Coming

Lastly, an announcement: over the coming weeks, expect significant changes to this site.

When I first created my WordPress site three years ago (hard to believe it’s been that long), I did so for the expressed purpose of building my platform as a writer and growing an audience.  While of course I’d intended to post the occasional short fiction piece and periodic pieces of non-fiction, this site was intended as an extension of my efforts as a novelist; a means, not an end.  My website was never intended to be the focus of my efforts, yet I fear amidst my frustrations over the past year that is what it has become.

It makes sense, I suppose: once my efforts to write another novel or publish a short story grew stagnant and frustrating, I embraced the platform that had largely embraced me.  Gradually, my posts regarding my novels and short stories dried up, to the point where my weekly Reading Day post was the one post I made unfailingly each week, and my weekly fiction output was reduced to the 100-175 words I wrote each week for my participation in the “Flash Fiction for Aspiring Writers” prompt.  The rebranding of my site as “The Outer Universe” some time ago was, upon retrospect, something of a grim resignation: the acceptance of the idea that this represented the extent of my efforts and ambitions.

Over the past week I can to remember who I am, and what I aspire to be.  As such, over the coming weeks I intend to shift focus back to my efforts in writing.  While posts like Reading Day will remain, and I’ve no intention as yet of ceasing my participation in Flash Fiction for Aspiring Writers, henceforth this site will serve once more as a window into my universe, not the sum total of it.

This week was something I’ve needed for a long time.  While I feel I’ve been inching back into things for a while now, this represents a huge leap forward, which I really needed to keep myself going.  I know I say it often, but for the first time in a long time I truly feel big things lie ahead, dreamers.  Thank you for sticking with me through all of this.  After all, if you’re reading this, I’m doing this for you. – MK