Hello, dreamers. Novel writing season is upon us. After completing Preshelets last week, for the first time in far too long I find myself with something I’m written that feels like a leap forward. I’ll have more on that in a minute. But suffice to say, I finally feel ready to dive into my next big project: Aquarius 1.

If this goes the way most of my novel projects do, this project will consume the bulk of my writing time and efforts for the rest of the year, and likely on into the next. So with that said, here’s what I’ll be up to this week:

Пришелец

I’m pleased to report that last Monday night I did, in fact, complete Preshelets. After taking a day away from the story, I managed to edit the entire thing on Wednesday night. And as of this weekend, I’m shopping it around for publication.

It’s been a long time since I’ve shopped a short story around, and even longer since I did so with a story I really believed had potential. But this one is special. I’ve done a lot of research into modern literature over the past year, and frankly, it was both enlightening and mildly annoying. The annoyance came from the simple fact that, as far as I can tell, modern literature demands that authors write the way I instinctively write. And, based on a lot of really bad advice, I’ve spent years trying very hard not to write like that.

So when writing Preshelets, I took the gloves off. I let myself get into Grigory Korsakov’s head, see the entire story through his eyes, feel it through him. And it took on a life of its own. What resulted was a dark, riveting story, the sort of thing I hadn’t written in far too long. It feels like something I would want to read. And hopefully others will feel that way too.

Writing this story felt like walking through a door and closing it behind me. Not since Pioneers have I written something that felt like a huge leap forward in my writing. I already have plans to enter this story into short fiction contests, should Asimov‘s (likely) decline to buy it. This is too good to not put it out there somewhere.

Querying Pioneers

So as planned, last week I made time to visit Joseph Beth, the foremost independent bookseller in Cincinnati. These guys are the best, and have become an excellent source for market research, gifts for my partner, and of course books (particularly the books of the Expanse series, which are to me the literary equivalent of heroin). They have a fellow there who’s very well-versed in genre fic, so I gave him the dust jacket summary of Pioneers, and asked him for comps.

The response was essentially what I’d pictured as the worst-case scenario. After staring at me for a moment, like I was driving toward him at the wheel of a semi, he said, “I think the best I could do would be the work of Jules Verne”. I replied that, given Mr. Verne has been dead for about 120 years, I probably can’t comp his work for my novel.

As expected, the big hang-up was my novel’s hopeful tone. Optimistic sci-fi is an aggravating Catch-22 in today’s literary market: many agents are looking for it, but comping it is extremely difficult, because frankly there’s almost none of it out there. I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve started wondering if I can comp my work to novels set in the Star Trek universe. After all, some of my first favorite books were Trek fic written by Peter David.

On the bright side, after the shock had worn off the fellow at Joseph Beth did float Children of Time (which I’ve already tabbed as a comp), and suggested I take a look at the work of Ted Chiang. Chiang only writes short stories, but his story Story of Your Life was the basis for the film Arrival, one of my favorite sci-fi movies (which means “one of my favorite movies in general”). He suggested I check back with him at some point after he’d had a chance to think. I plan to do so, though I’m not keeping my hopes up.

For now, this has become the latest road block on my road to querying. The way things are right now, there’s really no point in writing a query letter, much less sending queries out, until I can find suitable comp titles. Over the coming week, I’m going to reach out again, and possibly record a query for “The Shit Nobody Tells You About Writing” to get into this month’s comps special. Here we go again…

Aquarius 1

For a variety of reasons, including reopening the book on comps for Pioneers and finding beta readers for Preshelets, I delayed work on Aquarius 1 until last Friday. However, I’m pleased to say I’m finally ready to take the plunge into this new project.

As I said in last week’s “Writer’s Desk”, writing isn’t an exact science. Nowhere is this more apparent to me than when starting a new novel. My novels always start with a basic sheet of concept notes. But as my work in engineering has taught me, a concept always looks good on paper. Once you actually try to build it, you quickly learn what will work and what won’t. And that means a lot of changes.

In the early stages of writing Pioneers, there were a lot of changes. I completely changed the characterization of one of my favorite characters mid-way through the fourth chapter. Everything is fluid at this stage. Over the past few days, I’ve made substantial changes to POV and characters. Among other things, I actually reversed a change I’d made over the past month. Lots of moving parts right now.

However, I did manage to lay down about 1,300 words. It’s a start, and I’ll be writing more in the coming days. The lessons I’ve learned reading The Expanse and writing Preshelets are evident: I’ve been asking myself what the Challenger smells like, trying to put myself in characters’ shoes, behind their eyes. Last year at this time, when I first hatched the idea for Aquarius 1, my biggest fear was that it could never be as good as Pioneers.

Now, my biggest fear is that it could end up being much, much better.

New Content

Once again, I found myself consumed by Пришелец, and didn’t end up making any additional posts last week. However, that will change this week. Over the coming week, I’m going to be resuming my weekly WIP posts, and may also make an additional post updating readers on my Pioneers querying process, and the journey I’ve had writing the novel. I’m entering the busiest time of the year for my writing pursuits: novel-writing season is upon us. That means I’ll be doing plenty of writing and posting over the coming months. So keep an eye out for new content. And as always, dare to dream. – MK