Hello again, dreamers.  After completing phase one of my recently re-titled work-in-progress, I’ll be spending most of this week revising, reworking, and planning for the phase ahead.  However, things can still happen on an off-week, and there’s plenty in store.  Here’s what will be keeping me busy this week:

The Pioneer

First off, of course, there’s the change in title.

I’ve been wrestling with this one for a while.  I was never overly fond of the title “Samarkand”, and as such it was always something of a placeholder.  I think, sometimes, one must write a story before deciding what it should be called (after all, I’m usually a few paragraphs into a short story before it gets a name).  So it took a while for me to decide on a suitable title.  The process of renaming the story began a few weeks ago, as I began getting a better picture of how the story would progress, both in this installment and subsequent planned novels.

For at least the next several installments, When We Left Earth will focus on a particular group of people, known collectively as the Pioneers.  Hailing predominantly from North and Central America, the Pioneers are the best and brightest of a generation: talented, hardy men and women who take it upon themselves to settle on alien planets orbiting alien stars, driven ever forward by a secularized concept of Manifest Destiny.  The Pioneers are, in a sense, the ultimate humanists: they believe that mankind has a responsibility to conquer space while safeguarding the unique ecosystems of foreign worlds.

These are a passionate, optimistic, intensely idealistic group of people, whose love of the frontier lifestyle and rugged sense of independence will ultimately put them at odds with the people of the star system they left behind, leading inevitably to an interstellar conflict known as the Pioneer Wars, which will serve as the climax of the overall story arc of these novels.

As such, I’ve grown keenly aware of the need to not only tell this story, but also use it to begin planting the seeds of what is to come.  Initially, I’d considered renaming this story The Pioneers, but as that was to be the name of the next novel, that led to a few problems.  In the end, the title I’ve settled on came from the name of an existing chapter in this story, which serves as the reader’s introduction to my protagonist, Randall Holmes.  As the story will mostly revolve around him, as his actions set the tone for the Pioneers to come, I felt a fitting name for the story would be The Pioneer.

With that matter settled, as I said this week will be devoted to revision and reworking.  Safe to say, I have my work cut out for me.  Much changed over the course of writing the first five chapters of The Pioneer, and while the basic gist of things is sound, there will be a great deal of embellishment, as I infuse the earlier chapters with the rich feel things have taken.  It will no doubt be a rewarding task when all is said and done, but it is not a task I’m looking forward to.

In addition, I’ll be spending a great deal of time in research this week.  I have a pretty good idea of what, exactly the ninth planet of the Phecda star system will look like, in the general sense.  However, the more I look ahead into the story, the more I realize just how much more needs to be done.

At this point, Phecda 9 is passing through an era roughly analogous to Earth’s middle cretaceous period, though the planet’s global temperatures are noticeably lower than Earth’s during that period.  As the planet is very similar to our own, however, much of the native flora and fauna will be somewhat familiar: the planet is dominated by dinosaurid creatures not unlike the those we’ve seen in our fossil record, albeit mostly with thicker feathers, owing to the planet’s cooler climate.

So far, I have a decent idea of what the terrestrial flora will look like, but the only terrestrial animal I’ve come up with is a large apex predator: a medium-sized tyrannosaur with bright scarlet plumage, known to the colonists as a jing (short for yutyrannus xinghong, roughly “scarlet-feathered tyrant”).  But obviously there has to be something for this creature to eat (and for the colonists to eat before establishing agriculture, for that matter).  It must have competition from smaller, faster predators.  There would no doubt be pterasaurs, primitive birds, very early mammals.  Even insects might be important, smaller cold-blooded reptiles, on and on and on.

As I said, I have a lot to do.

Short Fiction

Well, at least earlier on in the week I’ll have plenty of extra time to write things I haven’t been writing, and I plan to make the most of the opportunity.  As I’ve said, I have several new short stories, and though only one of them is currently complete I have a good sense of where I’m going with the next.  I also have two stories currently awaiting revision, which I should be able to convert into manuscripts in short order.  I feel very good about these stories, and may soon be ready to start shopping them around in addition to my existing manuscripts.

I’ve been out of the game for too long, and I keep feeling that I’m getting closer and closer to finally finding publication in a literary journal.  The time has come to put myself back out there, and hopefully by the end of the week I’ll be doing exactly that.

I have another busy week ahead, dreamers, but I still feel that things are humming along right now.  Keep checking back, keep reading, and dare to dream. – MK