Hello again, dreamers.

I wasn’t sure if I’d be making another one of these posts so soon. But things can take a funny turn sometimes. As such, I find myself making an unexpected WIP Wednesday post, concerning what may be my new work-in-progress:

Pathfinder

Perhaps I’ve come full-circle. It’s hard to say at this point, but lately my thoughts have been returning to my previously-abandoned work-in-progress: the first installment of When We Left Earth.

First, for my more recent readers, a primer:

Pathfinder takes place in 2094, decades prior to the events of The Pioneer. At this point, Randall Holmes is an astronaut, eager to leave Earth and explore the cosmos. Years of hard work have landed him a coveted position on the crew of the Pathfinder 7, mission: humanity’s first manned mission to an Earth-like exoplanet, the sixth planet orbiting the star Vega.

Originally, Pathfinder was to be the first novel in a series I’ve dubbed When We Left Earth. However, after spending several years banging my head off the story with little success (and countless rewrites), this summer I finally abandoned the story, and instead wrote The Pioneer. Yet just as Wide Horizon proved to be a proof-of-concept for writing a novel in general, I’ve begun feeling that The Pioneer was a proof-of-concept for writing When We Left Earth. Pathfinder is an expansive story: it takes place across several planets, over a span of years. It deals with everything from technological progress to social upheaval to international (and, ultimately, interplanetary) politics. This is all important for laying the groundwork for the novels that follow, including The Pioneer. However, it also made Pathfinder unlike anything I’d ever written before, and I must admit I found the prospect daunting.

About the only thing I really knew going in was that writing Pathfinder would be nothing like writing Wide Horizon. But now, with The Pioneer behind me (or at least the first draft), I feel I’ve found my voice for When We Left Earth. Over the course of writing The Pioneer I adopted a different style of writing for the series: less verbose, more efficient, with more natural, conversational dialogue. I managed to move away from the high drama of Wide Horizon, with its powerful speeches and epic space battles, and make characters living on an alien planet a century from now seem real. And now, having done this, I find my thoughts turning back toward Pathfinder.

Ironically, because the events of Pathfinder played a major role in the backstory of The Pioneer, I feel I have a much better feel for the story now than I did before. And so, perhaps now the time has come to go back to where this all began.

As of this writing, I’ve begun the legwork. Much will need to be done before I am to begin writing again in earnest. The Pathfinder master file is a mess, owing in no small part to countless rewrites, not to mention odd tangents that ended up leading nowhere. What’s more, I plan to adapt the format I used in The Pioneer for Pathfinder, which will take some time, even though I’ve only written a few chapters to date. But something feels different this time. I can hear the characters, see them, watch them interact in ways I never could before. I feel the time has come. I feel I might be ready.

Time will tell. As I said, I have a lot of work to do. I also have plenty of work ahead of me querying Wide Horizon and editing The Pioneer. But I’m going to see how this goes. Until next week, dare to dream. – MK