Hello, dreamers, and welcome back to #WIPWednesday.

For the uninitiated, Wednesday is the day each week that writers use to discuss and promote their current work-in-progress. This week, I’m devoting my #WIPWedneday post to introducing a completed work I will soon be querying.

Pioneers

My most treasured work of fiction to date, Pioneers is intended as the first novel in a series.

Set in 2122, Pioneers follows a group of five thousand colonists seeking to settle a planet orbiting Megrez, a star in the Ursa Moving Group approximately eighty light-years from Earth. The planet in question, Megrez 9, is passing through a period analogous to Earth’s late Cretaceous. As such, the planet’s biosphere consists primarily of dinosaurs, most of which are covered in thick feathers due partly to comparatively low average surface temperatures.

The story revolves primarily around Randall Holmes: a biologist and survival expert. A former astronaut, Holmes was a member of the ill-fated Pathfinder 7 mission to Vega, and was the sole survivor. Seeking to start over, he signs on with the Samarkand expedition. He is joined by Nina Stark, an engineer and the daughter of the Pathfinder 7 mission commander, and William Ford, a young African American exobiologist.

Together, the three must face the perils of setting up a colony on an alien planet, while working to preserve the planet’s native biosphere and learning to coexist with their new ecosystem. The colonists are devoted to minimizing their impact on their environment, in hopes of learning to coexist with nature, rather than removing themselves from it as most humans of their era do. And when disaster hits, Holmes and his companions are thrust into leadership roles, and discover they are capable of more than they realize.

From beginning to end, writing the Pioneers was an affirming experience. All told, it took me roughly two years to complete the first draft of Wide Horizon. The first draft of Pioneers took a mere eight months. Since then, I’ve revised and reworked several times, paring down the story in preparation for querying.

The time for preparation is nearly over. Starting next month, I’ll be querying Pioneers at last. As such, the next #WIPWednesday post will look ahead to the next steps in the Pioneer series. Until then, dare to dream. – MK