Hello, dreamers. And welcome to another edition of #WIPWednesday.

As of this week, I still find myself without a current novel project. Obviously I want to pick something up before summer, but right now I’m thoroughly enjoying my focus on short fiction. I’m loath to rush into something and break my stride. That said, as I’ve been working on Dotiverse short stories, obviously my series of novels is never far from my mind.

As I’ve said, my next novel project will surely be either Pathfinder or The Pioneer Era. And as I focused on Pathfinder last week, it seems only fair to give the other potential project some air time.

The Pioneer Era

I’ve written a lot of these posts about The Pioneer Era. Few of them have been recent. And much has changed since the last time I mentioned it.

My longtime readers will remember my frustration with The Pioneer Era, when I first took up the project. Not since Pathfinder had I found a story I wanted to write so badly but simply couldn’t. I banged my head off that project for over a year, the story spinning off in strange directions before sputtering to a halt. I had lost control. I even changed the title three times before landing on the current one.

Since then, I have done a little work on the story, and it’s been promising. Most of what I’ve done has consisted of putting things back the way they should be: eliminating errant story lines, and getting back to my original concept. Thankfully, unlike Pathfinder, The Pioneer Era doesn’t look like it will require a comprehensive rewrite. There are a lot of good chapters, some I would even consider on par with the work I did on Pioneers. But while the story works well in the first phase, most of the subsequent two will have to go.

While writing The Pioneer Era (which, at the time, I was calling Dawn of the Pioneers), I fell into a lot of common pitfalls of modern sci-fi writers. I became overly concerned with representation. I got bogged down in politics. And ultimately I strayed from my original concept notes, replacing the intended storyline of phases one and two with an early introduction of a major character that threw everything off. I created new characters that fell flat. And ultimately this led to an almost silly plot line involving a disaster aboard a space station leading somehow to a politician discovering a species of primitive hominins on a colonized planet. It was hokey. It was stupid. So I decided to pitch it all, and went back to my original story idea.

While the second half of The Pioneer Era is intended primarily to set the stage for the subsequent Pioneer Wars, the first half was intended to show the Pioneers at the height of their burgeoning civilization. Far from the political intrigue and terrorism of my eventual story, the original plot of phases one and two were to focus on the interactions between the Pioneer colonies and the First Nation: a coalition of native tribes from North America who left Earth behind to find a new homeland on another world. As originally planned, the plot was set in motion by the introduction of a new major character: Russell Witkó, an Oglala botanist who goes by the nickname “Coyate”.

But when I first set out to write Dawn of the Pioneers, for reasons I cannot remember I chose to remove Coyate from the story. I replaced him with the early introduction of T.R. Weiss: a political leader from the nearby colony of Acadia, in the Merak star system. Originally, Weiss was to have been a firebrand revolutionary on his planet, running for president against incumbent Candice Laughlan, who unlike Weiss was profoundly opposed to the colonies declaring independence from Earth. From there, the changes spiraled. Now, Weiss was the incumbent president, turning up in a crashed lander on Denali, with Laughlan as his vice president, who was actively plotting his death.

Why the president of the most influential Pioneer colony would leave his planet for two years leading up to a contentious re-election bid was one of many questions I never properly answered. Frankly, it wasn’t even the worst. Everything spun out of control from there. By the time I reached the third chapter of phase three, I’d had enough. I couldn’t stand most of what I’d read. The story plodded along, delving into political minutiae and a ham-fisted attempt at a romantic subplot between Randall Holmes and Weiss’s overly-protective, hypercompetent chief of staff. It was a mess.

So, over the past year I’ve reined in the story. Now I feel much better about its overall direction, especially with regards to the first two phases. Instead of a storyline leading to a politician improbably discovering a species of primitive hominins on a human-colonized planet (in which I’d blatantly violated my own “Alien Rule”, a cornerstone of my continuity), I now plan to focus on the conflict between the First Nation inhabitants of said planet and the new settlers who seek to replace them.

I still have a lot of unanswered questions. Character appearances and interactions remain unresolved. I have a lot of work to do on my background notes, especially with regards to technology and culture, before I’ll feel comfortable returning to the story. But I believe that, when I do, The Pioneer Era will be what Dawn of the Pioneers never was: a fitting sequel to my finest work to date. – MK