First of all, let me go ahead and confirm that yes, I know it’s Thursday.

However, I’ve been planning this for a week or so now.  Lately, I’ve come to realize that much of my posting occurs during the beginning and end of the week.  I have my weekend features, then the Writer’s Desk and weekly flash fiction on Monday, but after that my readers typically don’t hear from me until the weekend.  While most weeks I’ll have view and likes on my flash fiction peppered throughout the week, by and large readership drops off by Wednesday.

I also have a habit of posting more frequently when I’m working on a major project (for instance, during my editing of Wide Horizon at the end of last year), mainly just to organize my thoughts while also keeping readers abreast of what I’m up to.  So, with writing on Samarkand ramping up, I’ve come up with a way to both get information out there and fill in the dead zone at the middle of each week.

For those who aren’t involved in the writing community on Twitter, Wednesday is usually the day on which novelists share thoughts, quotes, and sneak peeks from their current work-in-progress, often accompanied by the hashtag #WIPWednesday.  This, I feel, offers me an excellent opportunity to really go into detail on how things are going with my current work-in-progress, and in so doing bring my readers into my world in a way I haven’t since writing Wide Horizon.  So, off I go:

Samarkand

I’m really enjoying the new approach I’ve taken to this story, and that enjoyment has shown in my ballooning daily word count.  Today, my first day back on the job as it were, I only managed around 1,000 words, but the fact that 1,000 words in a day has become a slow day for me speaks volumes.  And even yesterday, amid marking the holiday with friends, I still managed to jot down several paragraphs.  This is going exceedingly well.

More than anything, I feel the true value to the story of this approach will be decompression.  I had a clear idea of where the story was supposed to go, but because I had no clear framework on which to build it, I ended up making everything happen much too fast.  At the rate the plot was progressing, I felt everything was crowded together: I wasn’t taking enough time to introduce the characters, explain the premise.  I was basically just blandly recounting events as they unfolded.

This new approach to the start of the book offers more time to develop the plot.  With a much smaller group of characters to work with, I can take time to develop the premise, help the reader understand just what, exactly, is going on.  In some ways I really like the general feel of the story at this early point.  The colonists are all still in cold storage, yet to be revived.  The Susan Constant is running on low-power, her corridors silent and dark.  There’s a sense of foreboding, but also anticipation.  I want to convey a sense of urgency for the crew: the idea that they have something extremely important to do, because something big is about to happen.  This…this is the way this story is supposed to start.

One of the things I’ve learned in writing is that the first chapter of a novel is both the most important part of a story and the most difficult to write.  This is your hook, your one and only chance to suck the reader in.  I completely rewrote the first several paragraphs of Wide Horizon no less than five times.  And even now, a small part of me isn’t fully satisfied.  While I was happy with the opening page of Samarkand, I felt the story went downhill from there.  That is no longer the case.

Perhaps the biggest surprise so far has been how easy this has been.  From the beginning, I’ve wanted the novels of When We Left Earth to be firmly rooted in science.  It’s not enough for the story to simply be compelling, it has to be believeable.  Even at this point in the story, set over a century from now, I need my readers to feel that this is something that could conceivably happen.  As a work of soft science fiction, Wide Horizon was easy to the point of being effortless at times: freed from the need to provide anything further than vague explanations for the wondrous technology of the story, I was able to create spectacular imagery at a whim.  If I needed a new type of technology to make a story element work, I could just make it up, science and reality be damned.

Thus, one of my biggest fears in writing When We Left Earth was that the stories would be tedious: hours of research interspersed between writing a paragraph or two.  I feared that I’d get so bogged down in the science of things that character development would suffer.  So far, though, that has not been the case.  I find myself researching on the fly, to the point where reading about spatial phenomena, particle physics, and other concepts crucial to space travel melds seamlessly with my writing.  It’s simply become part of my process, and a part that often fades into the background.  Everything I read is instantly incorporated into the imagery of the story.  This isn’t excruciating work; this is fun.

Of course, there’s still a lot to do.  Even though I fully intend to press on through the weekend, I’m still not fully convinced at this point that I’ll be able to complete what I’m now calling Phase One by Sunday evening.  But it’s hard to be upset by this.  Once completed, the current chapters will likely need far more heavy revision than chapters of Wide Horizon required, but who cares?  Against all odds, I think I’ve found my rhythm with this story, and I couldn’t be more excited to see where it leads me next.

It’s already been a fun week, and I’m not done yet.