Hello again, dreamers. It’s been a while since I’ve made one of these posts. Too long, and unfortunately it’s a day late. But I’ve had a lot to do. So, let’s get right to it.

The Pioneer Era

While I’ve yet to resume writing in earnest, I’ve been busy this week.

I’ve been away from The Pioneer Era for a long time. After several years of frustration, I did what I normally do with projects that can’t seem to go anywhere: I stepped away from it. Since stepping back during NaNoWriMo 2020, I’ve instead busied myself with revising Pioneers, including editing and a second round of beta reading. I spent much of my time writing focused on short fiction, though this past year I revisited Pathfinder. I managed a few good chapters on that project, before realizing the changes I’d need to make given how the story changed with Pioneers would likely require a complete rewrite of most of the existing work.

Thus, my first order of business is to reacquaint myself with this project. Given how my last read-through went last year, I went into this expecting to be disgusted with most everything I’d written thus far, and scrap the entire thing, starting from scratch. Amazingly, however, so far that hasn’t been the case. Perhaps my dismay upon my last reading was borne of my long-running frustration with the direction of the story. But even though I’ve spent a lot of time reading back through Pioneers in preparation for querying, my initial re-read of The Pioneer Era hasn’t been as disappointing as I’d expected it to be.

From the get go, The Pioneer Era has been a new experience for me: writing a sequel. It’s been difficult to decide how, exactly, to resume the story after leaving things off in Pioneers. This is complicated by the time jump: the events of The Pioneer Era begin thirty years after the end of Pioneers. Though I’d anticipated that this leap forward would make some aspects of the writing easier, the jump was made purely for story purposes. At this point in the Pioneer universe, humanity is still traveling between stars through the use of the Alcubierre-Casimir drive: a device that warps space around a spacecraft, permitting relative travel faster than the speed of light. But because the story is firmly rooted in accepted science, this technology has limits: though it permits travel faster than light, it does so only to a point. Travel between star systems is still typically measured in years. So if a character, like Randall Holmes, has spent time traveling between numerous star systems, decades pass in the interim.

This means that the early stages of the story must, by necessity, be heavy on exposition.

For writers of speculative fiction, exposition is a bane of existence. It’s necessary, even crucial, to explain how a speculative universe works, from technology to details of culture. But exposition can be a pernicious trap: it’s easy to get bogged down in lengthy explanations of lore. These often seem important, even good, at first glance. But while the writer may delight in explaining the finer points of the rich universe they have written, to the reader it can cause the story to drag.

When I wrote the first draft of my debut novel, Wide Horizon, I fell hard into the exposition trap. I had entire paragraphs, even pages devoted to explaining everything from the function of obscure technology to the appearance and nature of stellar phenomena. Luckily, I learned my lessons quickly. The fact is, there are right and wrong ways to do exposition. Over time, I developed a few simple rules:

First, limit straight exposition. I try to hold myself to only one paragraph at a time unless absolutely necessary.

Second, work exposition into dialogue when possible. It helps if I can have characters discuss something rather than just droning on myself for several sentences. However, this can be problematic, as a writer can run the risk of falling into what I call the “Star Trek Trap”, in which characters in a story spend time explaining technology they should already understand. While readers may not, for instance, understand how the Alcubierre-Casimir drive functions, to the characters it’s a fact of life. Having them spend time explaining it would be no different than having characters in a contemporary story pause before starting their car to explain how internal combustion works.

Third, work exposition into setting. Many of my chapters begin with one to three paragraphs of “setting the scene”. I do this to help the reader quickly visualize the setting before getting into the action. I find it’s a great way to provide important information on the scene while still allowing the story to flow.

Unfortunately, at the outset of The Pioneer Era I have thirty years of story progression to cover before getting to the action of the story. Luckily, it doesn’t all have to come out at one time, and my quote chapters help. But it’s a daunting task. And I feel it’s crucial to get a lot of that background out of the way before introducing important new characters.

I may yet rework the opening chapter, or chapters. I’m still certain at least some of the set-up chapters will need to be rewritten before I can move forward. In some ways, I’m disappointed: it would have been more straightforward if I’d have started reading and simply decided the lot of it was garbage. Now, I’m not entirely certain where to go from here. But I hope to begin writing new material, and thus writing The Pioneer Era in earnest, tomorrow. Until then, as always, dare to dream. – MK