Hello again, dreamers.  It’s been quite a week.  While I’ve been on a tear over the past few months, I feel confident in saying I haven’t put in this much work on so many diverse projects in quite some time.  And I must say it was a deeply rewarding experience.

For the first time in a while, I have a lot of progress to report, so here’s what I did this week:

The Pioneer

NaNoWriMo 2018 is well underway, and it feels very, very good to be back to work on my work-in-progress.

I got off to a slow start, managing only about 400 words on day one.  But today I ramped things up: I managed 1,252 words so far, and I’m probably not done for the night.  I also participated in my first word sprint this evening, most likely the first of many as I found the experience exhilarating.  I’ve seen and heard a lot about pacing with NaNoWriMo, particularly from those who suggest allowing nothing to break the flow of things.  That includes putting in placeholders for such things as scientific terms, rather than pausing to look things up.  That being said, I have no intention to modify my writing process.  If I’m writing something and need to refer to my notes or thumb through a few articles,so be it.  Before Pitch Wars I was averaging around 3,500 words a night.  If I can get back into mid-season form, I think I’ve got this.

To be brutally honest, part of the reason I put myself on partial hiatus at the start of Pitch Wars was simply because I’d run into a wall.  After laying down 50,000 words I was incredibly proud of, upon starting phase 3 I simply couldn’t find a rhythm.  Everything seemed canned and plodding, and far too predictable.  After what I’d written to that point, I just shake the feeling that the start of phase 3 was too trite and expected to fit with the rest of the story.

I tried to salvage what I’d written, but to no avail.  Thus, I made the difficult decision to simply burn the first one and a half chapters of this phase of the story and start from scratch, and so far I’m pleased with the results.  Whereas originally phase 3 began with Holmes and his companions returning to the Susan Constant to a hero’s welcome, making the rounds through their respective social circles, and then going through the motions of the initial settlement, this phase now begins in a garden.

The first chapter of phase 3 will begin with Holmes and the expedition’s agricultural expert, Dr. Dana Vilsack, discussing the colony’s food supply.  I like the idea of things just jumping right ahead, skipping the group’s return to the Constant and just getting right to it.  As of now, I also plan to have Holmes return to the surface only after the initial colony assembly is underway, and not playing a major role in the endeavor himself.  After all, while he may be the expedition’s survival expert, by trade he’s an astronaut and an exobiologist.  Safe to say he’d have little to offer when building a colony.

Instead, Holmes will take a small party out into the Sanctuary Valley to establish a forward research base, which will be used to study indigenous flora and fauna.  I also like the idea of Holmes spending a great deal of his time some distance from the colony proper, with only a handful of companions.

I can’t wait to see where all of this takes me next.

Short Fiction

My time spent on short fiction was also productive.  I’ll admit, over the past few years my short fiction game had grown stale; I had a bevy of outstanding projects, many of which I’d long since lost interest in, not to mention a small number of tired manuscripts.  I needed new material to share with the world.  I needed to finish…something.  Over the past two weeks, I succeeded on both counts.

I do hope my readers enjoyed my latest posted short fiction, Butterfly.  The story was one of five I began writing over the past few weeks, and one of two I finished this week prior to the start of NaNoWriMo.  I also completed Firestorm earlier this week, and after some consideration, decided Butterfly would be this month’s short fiction piece.  I also managed to get a good start on a number of other new stories.  One I’m particularly excited about, simply titled Time, involves an unsuspecting starship captain checking on an onboard experiment after a meteor shower.  As the containment vessel explodes, he’s caught in a field of intense time dilation, and the ensuing short story takes place entirely in the span of about .74 seconds.

That’s all for this week, dreamers, but it’s been a good one.  NaNoWriMo 2018 is off to a roaring start, I have a few new pieces of short fiction under my belt, and I’m excited to see what lies ahead.  Keep reading, and as always, dare to dream. – MK