Hello, dreamers. And welcome back to #WIPWednesday.

For the uninitiated, #WIP is a common hashtag on writing Twitter, short for “work-in-progress”. A writer today must always be working on something, and WIP has become shorthand for whatever one might consider one’s main project at the moment. #WIPWendesday has become a weekly event on Twitter in which writers discuss (and plug) their current work-in-progress.

As it’s been a while, and seeing as I’ve recently re-launched my website, perhaps it’s best to provide some background first.

The Pioneers

At the moment, I am between projects; completing one, restarting another. I’ll begin with the completed work, perhaps my most prized story.

The Pioneers is a work of hard science fiction. Set in 2122, the story follows a group of colonists looking to settle on the ninth planet orbiting the star Phecda, over eighty light years from Earth. The story primarily revolves around Randall Holmes: a biologist and survival expert from Stewart, British Columbia. A former astronaut, Holmes was the lone survivor of humanity’s first manned extrasolar mission, Pathfinder 7. Haunted by the experience of burying his crewmates, reproachful at being branded a hero at home, Holmes signs on with the colonial expedition hoping to get as far away from Earth as possible. But when disaster strikes and the colonists look to him for leadership, Holmes is forced to become the folk hero they believe him to be. The planet chosen by the colonists, Phecda 9, is passing through a period analogous to Earth’s Maastrichtian (late-Cretaceous), and as such is populated by a diverse range of feathered dinosaur species.

As of this writing, The Pioneers has completed final edits, and has been converted to manuscript format. I plan to spend the coming month working on my query letter and synopsis, before querying for publication.

The Pioneer Era

The Pioneers is intended as the first novel in a long series. The second, The Pioneer Era is currently in progress, but there have been a few setbacks.

Set over thirty years after the events of The Pioneers, The Pioneer Era sees Randall Holmes return to Phecda 9, now called Denali. There, he finds the colony he helped to build has developed into a thriving global community, with its own culture and a system of values based on conservation. However, the colony has now been joined by several others scattered across the Ursa Major Moving Group, some of which do not share Denali’s values. What’s more, the distance between the Ursa colonies and Earth has led to tensions, as the colonies continue to assert their independence.

The Pioneer Era is intended as a sort of intermediate story, bridging the gap between The Pioneers and the planned third novel in the series, The Pioneer Wars. And this transitional nature has proved…problematic. After writing most of The Pioneers during NaNoWriMo in 2018, I went into NaNoWriMo 2019 hoping to replicate my success. But while I technically “won” NaNo 2019, it didn’t feel like much of a victory. After straying from my initial concept, I ended up writing chapter after chapter of hollow drivel, and by early December I felt I’d accomplished nothing. The story simply didn’t feel right.

After nearly a year of frustration, last year I decided to scrap the vast majority of what I’d written. I went back to the first phase of the novel, rewriting large swaths of it to bring the story back to my original concept. And now, I finally feel like I’m back on track.

As of this writing, I haven’t yet resumed writing on The Pioneer Era. Currently, I’m focusing on short fiction (including new content for this site), several self-pub projects, and of course preparing to query for The Pioneers. For at least the next few weeks, work on The Pioneer Era will likely be limited to revising and reorganizing my notes. If all goes well, I plan to resume writing in earnest sometime in mid-September.