Hello, dreamers. It’s been a long, hard road, but I’m finally back at work on a novel project. It was roughly a year ago when I first hatched the idea for this novel. At first, I was tearing through it, but the further I got, the more I realized it just wasn’t cutting it. Something was missing. The story and its characters felt hollow, and my efforts to inject feeling only seemed to muddy the waters. It just wasn’t working. So, I did the only thing I could do, and stepped back.

Sometimes, when a story just isn’t panning out, the only thing left to do is start over. It can be hard to do: you look back at chapters of writing, and you’re looking at work. Good or bad, you did this. You sat down and put in hours of time and effort. It can feel like a betrayal, just burning it all and walking away. But the more you stare at something, the harder it is to see how to change it. Sooner or later, you have to accept that there’s no way forward.

That’s where I ended up last year with my work-in-progress. I set it all aside, and spent most of this year working on short fiction projects I’d back-burnered for years. In the end, it was rewarding, and it left me in a better place to do this story justice. Now, I’m finally ready, so I’m resuming my weekly “WIP Wednesday” posts.

Aquarius 1

A lot has changed over the past year. When I first set to work revising things during the summer, I reopened my notes on Aquarius 1, and told myself nothing was set (beyond the main character). Everything else should be questioned. I began with characters, and made a lot of changes. Arguably the biggest change was to the point-of-view characters.

Aquarius 1 will be a multi-POV novel: a popular modern format in which the story is told through the eyes of not one, but multiple main characters. I first experimented with multi-POV while writing Pioneers, simply because I felt it made sense. The story I was telling was, by necessity, told from multiple viewpoints: the colonists and the crew, those on the surface of Samarkand and those left behind in orbit. I felt it was important for the reader to see what was happening everywhere to get the full story. The same is true with Aquarius 1.

Arguably the biggest change I’ve made so far is deciding the story would largely be told from two POVs as opposed to three. Originally, I’d planned to have the story largely revolve around three main characters: Karen Hernandez (a marine biologist in her mid thirties), chief of science Anita Powell (an African American woman in her mid-forties), and Commander Indrani Chawla (a character who briefly appears in Pioneers, an Indian woman in her early fifties). But the more I thought about it, the more I didn’t like having Chawla serve as a main character. The weight of command, her vast experience as an astronaut, and the perspective of a middle-aged woman seemed too dense to do them justice. From the beginning, Karen was meant to be the main character. I ran the risk of letting Chawla steal the show.

So, I decided to remove Chawla’s POV, and this feels right. By keeping Anita as a POV character, I give the reader a look in at the ship’s command crew. That leaves Karen on the lower decks, and later exploring the surface. Furthermore, I’ve decided to make what was previously a supporting character a POV character upon his introduction later in the story. This will give readers a glimpse of life on Earth, while also balancing the story after Anita is effectively removed as a main character.

Since the story originally began with Chawla, I’ve now written new opening pages that begin briefly with Karen before switching to Anita. Now, I’m seeing the ship through the eyes of a character who’s both a member of the ship’s command staff and also an outsider (Anita is the only civilian on the command crew). I’ve done a lot to flesh out her character, including making her the only member of the command crew who’s married (and has children). All of this serves to enrich the story, showing things from a new angle. And I’m excited to see where this leads.

As of this writing, I’ve written about half of the first chapter (a little over 1,500 words). No doubt a lot will change in editing, but I’m excited about the direction this is taking. And for the first time, I can’t wait to write more. – MK