Hello, dreamers, and welcome to Week 2 of National Novel Writing Month.

After fits and starts, I’m finally ironing out the kinks in this year’s project. I still have more to do, but while the writing has slowed due to character shuffling, it’s coming together. Hopefully, this week I’ll finally hit my stride. That said, here’s what I’ll be up to this week:

Aquarius 1

So it didn’t take long for me to crumple up what I’d written of the second chapter and toss it. Once again, it felt like I was just going through the motions. The story felt soulless. And at least part of that was simply because I was writing about a character I really knew nothing about.

After some shocking revelations about Anita Powell and her personal life, I got back at it. I’m not about a page in on a much, much better second chapter, and I’m looking forward to writing more. However, the writing may be slow over the coming days, because I’ve made yet more changes to the characters.

My work on Endurance last week provided a lot of clarity, and made me decide I wasn’t done with the story’s main character. So, after a little double-checking on my continuity tonight, I made a fateful decision: Dauna Adkins is the commander of Aquarius 1. This will be a first for me: writing a character I’d previously focused on into another major project. But I’m eager to see what this next chapter of Dauna’s life holds.

With the commander now being American, I’m still wrestling with the nationalities of the others. I’m now considering making the ship’s operations officer Indian rather than Kenyan. But we shall see. I’m also considering making a change to the ship’s medical officer, possibly changing them from being a trans female to trans male, and I’m not married to the idea of him/her being Russian.

As all of these characters will appear in the upcoming chapter, these are decisions that must be made before I can press on. Which means those decisions will likely occupy the bulk of my writing time this evening. I’ll probably hop into a couple prospective character sketches, and see if any of them come a alive on me.

Querying Pioneers

So last week, I did it: I submitted a comps query to “The Shit No One Tells You About Writing”, and I dare say I’m very proud of it. I wrote out a script, rehearsed it, and recorded it about three dozen times before finally submitting. But it’s out there. I’m hoping a query about a story involving space colonies and alien dinosaurs with a hopeful tone will be wacky enough to get the ladies’ attention. Now all there is to do is wait until the month-end comps episode, and see if I made the cut.

In the meantime, my own work on comps continues apace. Last week I began reading Cibola Burn by James S.A. Corey. This is Expanse novel I’ve been anticipating, because it’s the one I expect to be able to comp Pioneers to. And so far, so good. I can see some clear correlations, including a few I hadn’t anticipated. And I’m making note of the points where my story clearly diverges. I also began reading Strange Dogs, a short story in the Expanse universe, which may be helpful. And lastly, I did in fact track down a short story collection from Ted Chiang. While I found it fascinating, it was immediately apparent that there’s no way I could ever comp this to my work. Besides being science fiction, our work has almost nothing in common.

When We Left Earth

I really, really love it when I write one of these posts and realize I made good on everything I said I was going to do in a week. Last week, I did in fact revisit When We Left Earth. Not only did I make a very productive revision pass on Endurance, but afterword I decided it was a lot better than I’d realized. So, I figured the time has come to begin releasing these stories. Endurance will be available on Amazon Kindle Unlimited on Friday, November 29 (click here to see more).

After that I was on a roll, so I quickly jumped over to the second story in the series, MERIT 19. And that one…is a mess. It looks even worse now than it did before. I may need to completely rewrite the story before daring to throw it out into the world. Luckily, I’ll have two months to do it.

New Content

This week, I’ll be resuming my “Sci-Fi Reviewed” posts on a limited basis. I’m doing something different this time around: reviewing a novel. Watch this Thursday for my review of book one of the Expanse series, Leviathan Wakes. Beyond that, I’ll be making my customary WIP Wednesday post and weekly NaNoWriMo update post. The latter has been moved to Saturdays, as hawkeyed readers will have noticed. It’s going to be a busy week. So keep reading, and dare to dream. – MK