Hello, dreamers. So it was a wild week. Like many writers in this country (certainly most sci-fi writers), I found it difficult to write, especially after Monday. But after doing some editing earlier this week, I got back to it today. Maybe I didn’t write a lot, but I wrote, and that matters. I’ll look to get back on track next week.

Still, I made some incredible progress today. What I did write I felt really good about. I think I finally have a solid opening for this story. And perhaps more importantly, I made a fateful change to a major character I’m very happy with. So here’s the latest on this year’s project:

Aquarius 1

Last weekend, I wrote the first two chapters of Aquarius 1. The first I felt very good about. The second, I didn’t like that much. I’m trying to inject more interiority into this story than any other novel I’ve written. But the second chapter once again just felt like going through the motions. Anita is revived. Anita goes to her quarters. Anita gazes out her window into space. Anita meets one of her crewmates. Anita goes to the command module. Blah blah blah.

It was just more of the same. I could easily have replaced Anita with any other character and it would’ve read the same. At most I’d have needed to change a few pronouns. I grew frustrated. I could feel myself moving away from this story, and I hated that. So, I started over. And then, something unexpected happened.

I decided Anita was a bad parent.

From the beginning, my fictional universe has included almost no characters who were parents. Most of them are only children. And this was all done for an important, story-related purpose. Long ago, when I first began creating this future, I did a lot of research on cultural and societal trends. And I began to realize that, in the future a century out or more, the human fertility rate would be a lot lower than it is now. In particular, it made sense that few, if any, astronauts would have children, or even partners. After all, it would be hard to carry on a romantic relationship (much less be a parent) when your work keeps you away from home for years. The process of cryonic preservation and revival would, by necessity, preclude children, who could be permanently harmed by such a dangerous process (to say nothing of the psychological trauma of literally dying and being revived).

But over the past few years, no doubt at least in part due to my own life experiences, I found myself wondering what parenthood would be like in this future I’ve created. Or what it would be like to be a child in the 22nd century. From the start, I’ve been looking for a way to differentiate Anita from the other major characters, not only in this book but in all my others. And then I found it: Anita is a parent.

My character notes on Anita Powell had already established that she’s a problem-solver, not just dedicated to her work but almost addicted to it. I pictured her as sort of a future Sherlock Holmes, working tirelessly because she can’t walk away from a problem. From the start, she was established as a hyper-competent character, who provides solutions for several of the biggest crises the crew faces early on. But perfect characters aren’t just unbelievable; they’re boring. I needed a chink in her armor, something that made her relatable.

As I began writing in her family, it began to emerge. Anita has a husband on Earth: a professor of literature, someone whose field of expertise clashes with her own. And she has a teenage son. And her teenage son resents her, because of how much time she’s spent in space, far from home. Far from him.

It would be easy, far too easy, to make her wracked with guilt over not being there for her son, or her husband. But science, math, and problem-solving are her true passions, and a person can’t have many of those. And there, I found her weakness: Anita doesn’t feel guilty because she misses her son. She feels guilty because she doesn’t. While heading to and from Ganymede, and spending a year and change there working on setting up their fusion reactor, Anita missed five of her son’s birthdays. She was back on Earth for less than a year before leaving for Mars, where she worked on the terraforming project. And the truth is, she doesn’t regret it. She feels like she should, and that is the root of her guilt.

Anita knows she’s a bad parent, and she believes it should bother her more than it does. She knew her son would hate her for leaving again, traveling all the way to another star system. It bothers her, but it didn’t bother her enough to keep her from leaving.

Suddenly, Anita Powell became a new kind of character. I began to view her as the sort of person science and space travel needs: a person so fervently dedicated to space exploration that they just can’t be bothered with the mundane concerns of human life. And while the Earth Space Administration lauds her contributions, her family is the sacrifice she’s made. All of this will play nicely into her character arc, and may at least slightly alter what I have planned for her. And it makes her a much more intriguing character.

Somehow, making Anita a less likeable person makes me like her more as a character. Because while she may not be such a good person, she’s becoming a great character. After all, in the end, a lot of the best literary characters aren’t good people. You wanna write a story where everybody’s lovable and nobody ever gets hurt? Go write for Hallmark. – MK