It’s finally happening.  After roughly two weeks of hard research and notes, I woke up this morning feeling the time had finally come.  I was ready to start writing Samarkand again.

To say that it went well is an understatement.  For the first time since Wide Horizon, I spent the entire day at work thinking about what I was going to write this evening.  It was almost distracting; I was eager to write all of this down.  Some major changes to the story came as recently as yesterday, and as I started writing, for the first time in a long time, I found I was able to improvise.  It felt good.  Really, really good.

Though putting down an entire chapter in a night felt good, I’m just getting started.  Here’s what’s coming this week:

Samarkand

After weeks of preparation, as I said as of this evening I’m back at work on Samarkand, and I feel very good about what I put down.  There have been some major changes, but I’m happy with where things are going, and eager to see where they lead.

The first major change involves the biggest restructuring of the plot to date.  As I’ve said recently, as I’ve worked my way through notes and character development, I’ve gotten a much better feel for the plot progression.  While I’m not yet considering abandoning my standard three-part format, I’ve begun seeing this story less as having a distinct beginning, middle, and end so much as unfolding in four rough phases.  Essentially, each phase focuses on one particular set of characters.  While I’d already planned out (and partially written) the second, third, and fourth phases, the first phase focuses on a group of characters I’d sadly ignored: the crew.

Originally, the approach to the ninth planet of the Phecda system was essentially glossed over.  The story was to begin with the ESA crew of the Susan Constant being revived from cold storage, deactivating the ship’s Alcubierre-Casimir drive, then reviving the colonists.  From then on, the crew (save Nina Stark) would play little more than a background role, quickly giving way to the administrative board, the colonists, and ultimately the protagonist, Randall Holmes.

The more I thought about this, the more I came to feel this was a waste, both of characters and word count.  The entire portion of the story focusing on the crew themselves took up less than two full chapters, and what’s worse, because they barely factored into the story at all after that, even devoting that much time to them felt wasteful.  I was essentially beginning a novel with about fifteen pages of filler, and when the climax of the story comes along, I’d be killing off five characters who’d served as little more than plot devices.

Thus, I’ve arrived at my first major change: writing phase one.  As the story stands now, when the crew is revived and drops out of FTL, rather than simply going about their routine duties and reviving the colonists, they are faced with an unexpected problem: a comet, the orbital path of which directly intersects with their optimal trajectory toward Phecda 9.  The comet’s presence is unexpected, and as they later learn a result of an oversight by which an ESA advance probe, Tamerlane, emerged from FTL within the system’s Oort Cloud.  The resulting gravitational disturbance produced a ripple effect, distorting orbital paths of numerous icy bodies in the outer system, ultimately diverting the path of a large comet.

While I have some research to do into the composition and orbital characteristics of comets over the next few days, in terms of the story the crew will spend the first three to five chapters essentially alone, figuring out how to avoid the comet without expending the majority of their fuel on a costly correction burn.  This eventually leads to a harrowing sequence in which the crew takes the Susan Constant on what is, essentially, a modified gravity-assist maneuver, slingshoting around the comet at close range.  In addition to helping the reader bond with the crew (as they are essentially the only characters at this point), it also helps to plug up a lingering plot hole in subsequent chapters.

Thus, I have my four phases: phase one, which introduces the main characters but focuses on the crew of the Susan Constant; phase two, which introduces the administrative board but focuses on my protagonist and the other two main characters; phase three, which begins to introduce the colonists themselves but focuses on the administrative board; and finally phase four, in which the colonists take center stage.

I have to say, it feels somewhat liberating to adopt this new format.  In many ways, I feel part of my frustration over both Samarkand and Pathfinder stemmed from my insistance on trying to shove the stories into my preferred three-part format.  In doing so, I prevented the story from unfolding organically, and perhaps more importantly risked creating a story that would hold few surprises for the reader.  I really like where all of this is going, and hope to have phase one complete by the end of the week.

Pathfinder

I’ll admit I’m placing this portion of the post under the Pathfinder heading mainly because I feel the need to make this about more than just one story.  And, in all fairness, while this does pertain mainly to Samarkand, my notes on Pathfinder played a significant role in the work I did today.

The other major change to Samarkand recently pertains to the colony ship itself, the ECV Susan Constant.  While I’ve had no trouble brainstorming and fleshing out innovative, realistic, eye-catching concepts for various spacecraft across these two stories, for some reason the ships at the heart of each, the Constellation in Pathfinder and the Susan Constant of Samarkand, have eluded me.  In both cases, I’ve spent years writing with little more than a vague idea of what each spacecraft looked like, inside or out, and the vague notion I had in both cases amounted to little more than a generic concept of a realistic interstellar spacecraft (engines, a cockpit, wheels for artificial gravity, etc).

With the writing of Samarkand resuming, this has developed into a glaring problem.  Perhaps most importantly, my basic reckoning of the Susan Constant was little more than a larger version of the Constellation.  From the story standpoint, this doesn’t make much sense: by this point, humanity has devoted the sum total of its scientific efforts to space travel, exploration, and colonization.  Why would a colony ship carrying five thousand colonists launched in the 2110s look and operate no differently from an earlier, single-use spacecraft designed to ferry seven astronauts on only the second manned interstellar mission?

The revelation really hit me as I was searching for reference images, trying to describe the Susan Constant over the course of the first chapter.  Yet rather than declaring the situation hopeless and giving up (as I had in the past), to my delight a new idea began forming in my head.  As the concept took shape, I found I was at last truly seeing the Susan Constant.

Bear in mind that as of this writing, I’ve yet to even update my concept notes, so this is the first time I’m putting this idea to paper (so to speak).  As it currently stands, the Susan Constant has grown…significantly.  Measuring three kilometers end-to-end, with two gravity wheels each a kilometer in diameter at its center, the Constant bears more resemblance to a space station than a spacecraft, right up to its forward end, which rather than simply leading to a cockpit is now dominated by a massive hangar bay, with the CCM located directly above on a 500 meter boom, tipped not with the command module but rather two modules set directly behind a large, collapsible debris shield.

The new concept does wonders for the story: not only does it produce an image that challenges our very perception of what a spacecraft would look like, but it also makes more sense.  After all, once the colonists are revived, they won’t be heading directly to their new home planet.  As such, the ship would need to maintain sufficient living space and amenities to keep the colonists safe and comfortable prior to planetfall (this neatly seals yet another plot hole that had been bothering me for years).

This new idea was a game-changer: rather than looking to concepts of interstellar spacecraft for inspiration, I found myself instead viewing concepts for massive space stations, essentially floating cities in space.  In this regard, I found my notes from Pathfinder exceedingly helpful.  Later this week, I may give myself the opportunity to go back and revisit the Constellation as well, and see if I might apply the same sort of unorthodox thinking to the central spacecraft of Pathfinder.  After all, while it seems likely that basic design norms established throughout our history of space travel won’t go away overnight, constructing a spacecraft to travel to other star systems, faster than the speed of light, would ultimately lead to us basically throwing out everything we think we know about spaceflight design.

New Short Fiction

A new month is upon us, and as such I intend to get back to my practice of posting at least one short story a month.  Thus, look for a new short fiction piece popping up on this site sometime later in the week.  While I intend to continue my free writing (at least for now), if things continue as they are that will eventually cease as I devote my full efforts to writing Samarkand.

 

I haven’t felt like this in a long time.  I have a clear path forward, and a secure framework in which to play around and improvise.  I can’t wait to see how things progress from here.  Keep dreaming. – MK