Hello, dreamers, and welcome to Week 1 of National Novel Writing Month.

Over the coming month, the bulk of my efforts will be devoted to my new novel project, Aquarius 1. During principal novel writing, I generally crank out a chapter a day. I’m not to that point just yet, but I’m ramping things up. I’ll be making weekly updates on my progress throughout the month. Of course, as I write hard sci-fi, it’s unlikely that I’ll actually finish the first draft by the end of the month. But I’m confident that I can make good progress nonetheless.

However, I’ll still be working on a lot of other things. I plan to continue query prep for Pioneers, and I’ll also be delving back into When We Left Earth. So with that said, here’s what I’ll be up to this week:

Aquarius 1

It’s all finally coming together. After a lot of changes, I’ve finally written the first two chapters of Aquarius 1. The story is very different this time around, as I’m incorporating a lot of the new techniques I developed while writing Preshelets. The story will now be told primarily from two POV’s: that of marine biologist Karen Hernandez and physicist Anita Powell.

Already, the story has taken some interesting turns, but so far it’s all going more or less according to plan, which is to be expected. Before I set it aside last year, I’d written a considerable amount of this story. Though I’m going in a very different direction in terms of the feel of the story, most of the plot remains unchanged. So at the moment the process consists of equal parts new material and adapting existing passages to the new format. One would think that would make it go a lot faster, but it’s not easy deciding exactly what to keep and what to pitch.

As it currently stands, over the coming two weeks I’ll probably be doing a lot of that. As such, I may end up getting away with pushing out two chapters a day instead of the customary one. One saving grace is that the story as it was originally written was very dry: I was basically going through the motions, documenting the plot without any interiority from the characters. That means the all-important framework is already there. I just need to add flavor.

On Wednesday, I’ll go into greater detail on how the story is going so far. With any luck, I’ll have at least three more chapters done by then.

Querying Pioneers

As I mentioned last week, my latest efforts to find suitable comps for my novel have been…less than successful. So this week, I plan to issue a plea for help.

Near the end of each month, the podcast “The Shit No One Tells You About Writing” does a special on comps, with an expert on the literary industry. In order to have a shot at getting onto the episode, aspiring writers must submit their request by the tenth of the month. Which means I have work to do.

Starting today, I plan to write out a brief script for my request. It will include basic points of Pioneers and the dust jacket summary, along with what I’ve found so far in terms of comps (which admittedly isn’t much). I’ll spend a few days rehearsing it, then hopefully by Wednesday or Thursday I’ll be ready to submit.

With any luck, my query will be selected for the month-end comps special. Unfortunately, most agents close for queries around the holidays, which means my window for querying this year has likely closed. At least this will give me time to work on my other querying materials. And when I submit early next year, I’ll be able to put my best foot forward.

When We Left Earth

When it comes to writing, as with every aspect of my life, it seems I’m never really satisfied unless I have a lot to do. So, in addition to writing Aquarius 1 and prepping to query Pioneers, this month I’m going to be delving back into my upcoming series of novellas, now collectively titled When We Left Earth.

I got the idea to get back into this series amid my recent success with Preshelets. And when I opened the first story, it was just as I’d feared: this is bad. Not world-ending bad, but definitely bad. In just the first few pages, I found entire paragraphs that really need to be rewritten. This is nowhere near my best work. And as it currently stands, these stories are to serve as a reader’s introduction to the fictional universe in which nearly all of my future work will be set. I can’t just toss a bunch of drivel out there and expect readers to get excited.

So, since work on Aquarius 1 will likely consist of a lot of copy and paste over the coming weeks, I’m going to use my extra time to work on refining When We Left Earth. I’d still very much like to get the first story out there by the holidays, but I’d rather delay until next year than rush this. When I begin releasing these stories, whenever that may be, I want them to be well worth reading.

New Content

So last week, I posted a little Halloween surprise for my readers. If you haven’t read Bridge yet, you can find it here. I also resumed my weekly “WIP Wednesday” posts, and posted another installment of “Dear Sir or Madam”: my periodic update to my querying journey, which will become a recurring post. I will continue to post regularly as we finish out the year. So keep an eye out for new content. And as always, dare to dream. – MK