Hello, dreamers. What a whirlwind this new year has been so far. I have a lot going on this week and the next several, so I’ll dive right into it. Here’s what I’ll be up to this week:

Aquarius 1

While my new work-in-progress continues to command the bulk of my time, I’ve taken a step back to reassess. This will be addressed at length in my WIP Wednesday post this week, but suffice to say I’ve realized I’ve been (arbitrarily) limiting my chapter lengths. The story has suffered as a result: far less description, less character development, action scenes ending abruptly. It’d been a concern I’d had since I began writing the story. I’d been meaning to go back to Pioneers and consult for chapter lengths. Now, looking back, I’m slightly impressed with myself for having written as good a story as I did while limiting myself to 2500 word chapters.

However, before I write on, I’ve determined that it’s best to go back and begin reworking the earlier chapters. I’ve learned the had way about the kinds of issues that can crop up if I identify problems with early chapters in a WIP and just keep writing. So, much of my work this week will be devoted to that process. At the moment, I still have several pages of clipped passages meant for the latest chapter of the novel. I will be cutting those together, along with probably about four pages of fresh prose, over the coming days. Then, I plan to step back and begin reworking the early chapters, which will likely occupy the bulk of my efforts this week. Much of my remaining effort will be devoted to my other new project…

Editing Wide Horizon

So there’s a title my longtime readers probably never thought they’d see again on one of these posts. But here we are.

For newer followers, Wide Horizon was my first novel. It’s currently available on Amazon, but in a matter of weeks I’ll be making it available on multiple new platforms, in order to expand my readership. This weekend, I began working on the story’s formatting, and I really had planned to leave it at that. But the more I read through the story, the more I felt a huge project coming on.

Wide Horizon was mostly written from 2013-2015, and that’s with a nearly two-year hiatus in there. So, realistically, most of the novel was written in 2013, with the very tail end chapters written in 2015. That means this novel was written (at least the first draft) when I was just starting out, still finding my voice as a writer. And though many have enjoyed the book, I no longer feel it’s a faithful representation of my work or myself as a writer.

I’ve come a long way since 2013. And I’ve learned a lot. Now that I’m going to be pushing Wide Horizon to a wider audience, I’ve decided that, for the first time since I wrote it, the novel is in need of an overhaul. Thus, I’ve committed myself to a full line-edit of the story. As of this writing, I’m already about six chapters in. It’s been a slog, and I plan additional posts this week on the subject. I’ll be posting not only about this fresh editing process, but also the process of writing Wide Horizon, all those years ago.

Today, I often dismiss Wide Horizon. I think that’s unfair. Though it is, do say the least, very different from what I write today, it’s an important first entry in my personal library. And for that, and how many readers have thoroughly enjoyed it, it deserves my respect.

Pioneers

I’m still planning to make final revisions to Pioneers, though those plans have been back-burnered amid everything else. My current plan is to get to the Pioneers revisions later this week, once everything else has died down. That runs concurrent with…

New Short Fiction

…or at least plans for more. It goes without saying that I have a lot going on right now, including where writing is concerned. But amid everything else, I’ve resolved to resume work on short fiction this coming weekend.

At the moment, I still have no plans to reintroduce monthly free short fiction in the near future, though I will continue to post weekly flash fiction every Friday. For now, my interest in resuming short fiction work pertains to a potential new project, which I announced this past weekend on my inaugural “Self-Pub Saturday” post. This new project, tentatively named Turn of the Century, would be a short story collection composed of my Beyond Pathfinder series of stories, three of which are currently available for free here on this site. The collection would serve as a reader’s introduction to my fictional universe, the Dotiverse, by following the lives of humans living and working in space around the dawn of the 22nd century.

Site Changes and New Content

Finally, work continues to improve my site. Regular readers have likely already noticed the removal of my longtime featured post, which was originally made to announce the initial launch of Wide Horizon on Amazon two years ago.

As I mentioned in last week’s Self-Pub Saturday, next month I will be making my existing self-pub works available on a wider range of platforms. This wider availability will coincide with temporary price drops on Amazon, as well as the release of new editions of both Wide Horizon and my short story collection Unrealized Realities. Keep an eye out for this week’s Self-Pub Saturday for more information on these new editions, which will make excellent additions to anyone’s Michael T. Kuester science fiction library. In addition to these releases, I will be revamping my “Latest Works” page.

While I don’t plan to resume monthly short fiction any time soon, that doesn’t mean new content isn’t coming. In addition to a planned “Teaser Tuesday” piece each week, I plan to make Thursday a day for featured posts. That includes my ongoing “Science in Fiction” monthly post, as well as the resumption of my monthly science fiction reviews of TV shows and movies. In addition, I plan to add at least one more featured monthly piece: “The Cutting Room Floor”, in which I discuss the editing underway on various projects. This will give readers a glimpse into my writing process, which has been absent from the site since my rebranding several years ago.

As if all that wasn’t enough, watch for revised repostings of some of my best short fictions pieces right here on Writing Tomorrow. For now, read on, and dare to dream. – MK