I’m pleased to report that I’ve had another productive week.  My new approach to my work-in-progress has continued to pay in dividends, and I’m feeling better about my next novel by the day.  While it seems every answered question leads to my asking a few more, I still consider that progress, as it means I’m starting to really flesh out the story, get a feel for it.  It’s starting to feel less like a rough framework and more like a workable narrative.

While admittedly I was a bit more scattered this week, all of that work led to plenty of output as I work back toward a healthy daily word count.  Here’s what I was up to this week:

Samarkand

I still have my work cut out for me, but things are really starting to come together, and at last I feel I’m ready to start writing again.

Once again this week, I devoted the bulk of my efforts to expanding my notes and developing the characters and the plot.  As I had hoped, really sitting down and thinking through the characters has helped to inform the plot: for the first time, I’m getting bits of dialogue, vital glimpses into how this story will work.  Now that I have a better idea of who the characters are, I find it’s easier to figure out how they interact, and how each of them will both react to changing circumstances and advance the overall plot.

Perhaps the most important breakthrough I had this week involved the story’s climax.  From the beginning, I’ve known that the story’s climax will involve the destruction of the expedition’s colony ship, the ECV Susan Constant.  However, I’ve had a hard time figuring out precisely what happens after that point.  Now, at last, I’m starting to get a clear picture, both of the immediate aftermath of that event and subsequent developments.  I’m finally starting to see how things will develop and change once the colonists realize they’re on their own, how they’ll be forced to cope with limited resources in a strange and hostile environment, and how this will ultimately contribute to later installments in the series.

Interestingly, the other major breakthrough I had this week involved the state of Earth in 2122.  In 2094, the year in which Pathfinder begins, mankind is still in the process of exploring, studying, and ultimately populating our own star system.  While by that point interplanetary travel is essentially routine (much as orbital travel is today), and many humans live their entire lives in space, interstellar travel is still in its infancy.  ESA personnel assigned to interstellar missions spend years training for one specific mission, learning the complex workings of spacecraft purpose-built for a single trip (think of the Apollo missions).  By the 2110s, however, interstellar travel is rapidly becoming routine.  At this point, mankind has ceased conducting huge one-off missions to distant star systems, and has instead taken to constructing spacecraft built for versatility, independence, and endurance, some of which are designed for almost continuous use.

For Samarkand, this is a game-changer.  Originally, I’d envisioned the Susan Constant and her crew operating in a proverbial vacuum (pardon the space pun): a lone spacecraft separated from any other human by intractable cosmic distance.  Now, while the Constant is still far from anyone who could provide material assistance (which helps to preserve the story), they’re hardly alone.  In fact, the conclusion of the story, which had originally involved one of the main characters, Nina, leaving the planet by some means I’d not fully defined (and kept changing), the ending now has her leaving aboard the Endurance: a deep-space exploration vehicle, which was exploring the region of space and was diverted to check on the colony.

That brings me neatly to yet another revelation this week: the changing nature of human space travel.  As I mentioned, in Pathfinder by 2094 interplanetary travel has already become routine: while only a select few ESA personnel are picked for the massive undertaking of interstellar missions that can involve spending decades in cold storage, many men and women live and work in space, often devoting their entire lives to that pursuit.  Essentially, by the late 21st century humans are already making the transition from making the sacrifice of leaving Earth behind to spend years in space to simply living in space.

By the 2110s, the shift toward routine interstellar travel has led to another transition.  While the use of the ACD (Alcubierre-Casimir Drive) allows faster-than-light travel and thus makes interstellar travel possible, it remains a time-consuming process.  Even traveling several times faster than the speed of light, a one-way trip from Earth to the Beta Ursae Moving Group (a collection of stars which includes Samarkand’s sun, Phecda) takes roughly eight and a half years.  As such, the ESA personnel who serve aboard interstellar spacecraft are required to spend years, even decades, away from not only Earth but virtually all other humans.

This has helped the story in an unexpected way, by helping to speed up a planned transition of ESA from being comprised mostly of career-driven individuals doing a job to a group of selfless explorers, willingly surrendering the better part of their lives to the pursuit of exploring the cosmos and expanding mankind’s frontiers.  At this point, it’s also led to the emerging importance of the distinction between biological age and chronological age: ESA crewmen serving aboard interstellar spacecraft are often far older in terms of years than they appear biologically, due to decades spent cryonically preserved in cold storage.

This also helps to set the crew apart from the colonists aboard the Constant: while the colonists are eager to plant a proverbial flag and establish new homes on a new planet, for the ESA crewmen the very concept of home has lost all meaning.

Pathfinder

While I didn’t do much with Pathfinder this week, I chose to mention it as my notes continue to inform the story in Samarkand.

While I continue to delve deeper into Samarkand, I’m keenly aware of where much of my background is coming from.  Indeed, I feel that figuring out how humanity has changed and progressed by Samarkand is also helping to redefine what mankind looks like back in 2094, at the start of Pathfinder.  It’s an interesting sensation, and one that’s reminded me that I cannot simply turn away from Pathfinder.

Short Fiction

Once more, I spent the week utilizing free writing as a means to keep myself from feeling that I’m not getting anything done.  And it’s paid off: though Short Story Saturday is tomorrow, I managed to nearly complete yet another short fiction piece this week, which I plan to knock out tomorrow.  The new story, 2 Jaguar, follows an Aztec jaguar warrior as he leads an attack on a rival city state, during the early years of the triple alliance that ultimately developed into the Aztec Empire, which dominated parts of Mexico and Central America from the mid-1300s until the capital, Tenochtitlan, was sacked by the Spanish Conquistadors in the 1500s.  Throughout the story, the action is interspersed with sections in which the warrior reminisces on the events that led him to this point.  Ultimately, the story will end with him making the decision to kill the city’s chieftan rather than capture him and bring him back to Tenochtitlan, in turn declaring himself the city’s new lord, and preparing to defend his prize from his former leaders.

In the coming week, either that story or my previous short story, Here with Me, will be posted here.

 

It’s been quite a week, dreamers, and it’s not over yet.  Watch for my weekly Short Story Saturday post tomorrow, followed by the Reading Day post and Writer’s Desk on Sunday.  And as always, dare to dream. – MK