At long last, I’m here. I’ve entered the query trenches. The coming year or more will be a flurry of activity interspersed with anxious periods of waiting. I’ll be fighting the urge to check my email every ten seconds. I’ll probably start biting my nails again. But with any luck, at the end I’ll have that long-awaited “yes”: an offer of representation, and a clear path to publication.

It’s been a long road just to get this far. And as I sit waiting for responses to my first round of queries, I find myself reflecting on the way here. So, for those of you who haven’t been following me from the start, here’s a brief look back at Pioneers: where it came from, how it happened, and how it became what, I hope, will soon grace the shelves at your local bookstore.

The Beginning

The story that would eventually become Pioneers arose from one of several ideas I had in high school. Originally, it was actually part of an exceedingly-detailed lore I’d written for a potential series of novels meant to take place in the 23rd century (about a hundred years after the events of Pioneers). But as I fleshed out my backstory, I came upon the idea of Randall Holmes: a naturalist, revolutionary figure, and frontiersman. After college when I finally decided to start writing, I grew increasingly enamored with Holmes.

The character drew extensive inspiration from Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. I was intrigued by the inherent tragedy of pioneers: men who set out for a life on the frontier, only to watch the frontier inevitably become as settled and built-up as the places they left behind. People who find themselves passed by and shuffled away by a society that once needed them and no longer does. Who try to settle into a civilized life, but ultimately fail. Who meet tragic ends.

And that last part became Holmes’s defining characteristic: a tragic character. From the beginning, I knew Holmes’s story wouldn’t be a happy one. For someone who prides themselves on their optimism and belief in happy endings, it was intriguing. I knew I wanted to write Holmes’s story. But frankly, I had no idea where to start.

Wide Horizon

In 2013, I finally sat down to write a novel. Originally, Pioneers (then titled The Colony) was to have been my first project. But after the better part of a year banging my head off the project, I had all of one page to show for it. In frustration, I picked up another long-standing project, desperate to finally find something I could write.

The result, a novel entitled Wide Horizon, became my proof-of-concept. It was, to say the least, nothing like anything else I’d written previously, or since. But its value to me lay in the simple affirmation that yes, I could do this. I could write an entire novel. Once the novel was complete, I was eager to move on to what I really wanted to do: the Pioneers series of novels.

There were more fits and starts. At first, I tried writing Pathfinder, which I’d originally intended as a prequel to be released sometime after Pioneers (at the time still titled The Colony). More frustration, more fits and starts. But by 2016, I’d learned a few things. I’d entered Wide Horizon in Pitch Wars, and received very positive feedback. That turned out to be the boost I needed, and I was ready.

Research came first. I spent roughly a year on research for Pioneers, despite having spent years working on lore for the overarching series. Even after all that, research continued during the actual writing. I read exhaustively on subjects ranging from fusion power to spaceflight design to agriculture, paleoclimate, and the history of life itself on Earth (which is…a hefty read). I spent an entire month researching nutrition and agriculture. At one point I was telling friends I was confident I could run a soybean farm. I read up on demographic trends and cultural shifts. I mapped out the settlement site on Samarkand, devised a rough schematic of the ECV Susan Constant. And, gradually, a world emerged.

The synthesis of all this produced a stable fictional framework in which I was free to focus on character arcs and plot points, with the background so richly developed I knew it by rote. As the story emerged from all the pages of notes, I started feeling it: the first stirrings of a story. The urge to try it out, to start writing.

NaNoWriMo 2018

My first attempt after the research made it all of three chapters before I realized how formulaic it was. Astronauts arrive at a planet, they land on the planet, they build a settlement, blah blah blah. So I flipped things around, instead focusing on the crew navigating around a comet. And that’s when things really took off.

By late September I’d completed seven chapters, comprising what would become Phase 1 of the novel. I’d also written the opening chapters of Phase 2. With National Novel Writing Month approaching, I decided to pause my writing and focus on short fiction through October. Then, starting on November 1, I was back at it, with the intention of writing “The End” in under a month.

NaNoWriMo 2018 was an incredible experience, and began my current writing regimen. Over the course of that November, I established many of the practices I still use now: taking a day between writing a chapter and revising, writing one chapter per day. The story just flowed out onto the page. By the second week of November, I was averaging roughly 5,000 words per day. I tore through Phase 2, then plowed through Phase 3.

The end was in sight. And I almost made it.

Then, I hit the wall.

The night before I was to begin Phase 4, I wrote the final two chapters of Phase 3 in one sitting. It was late at night, I was tired and depleted, and writing the climax of the novel turned out to be deeply emotional. That night I was overcome with anxiety for the coming chapters. I began to second-guess everything I’d done. I completely deleted the climactic chapters and rewrote them. Soon I realized I was experiencing burnout. I’d been scorching through the story so fast I hadn’t allowed myself to come up for air. I was writing every single night, caffeinated out of my mind, running on zeal and adrenaline. And I was spent.

I had less than a week to go, and at least five chapters remaining. I’d already completed the NaNoWriMo challenge (which is based on word count, not completing a story per se), but there was a sort of flex to actually writing “The End”. But I just couldn’t go on. So, I took a day. I called off work. I stayed in bed. I didn’t shower or shave. I traded Earl Grey for my favorite holiday ale, violated a longstanding personal rule against drinking in my pajamas, and watched corny sci-fi shows all day. And I didn’t regret a damn thing.

The following day, I went back to it. After my experience, I decided to name the first chapter of Phase 4 “Karrakins”: a group of chemicals found in nature, in the wake of a brushfire. Karrakins trigger seed release in some species of plants, so that each conflagration brings renewal. I finished the first draft in the second week of December.

The Pandemic

So at this point I had a completed first draft. Not including the pause in October, writing took about eight months; a vast improvement over the two years or so it took to write the first draft of Wide Horizon. So heading into 2019, I was feeling pretty good about myself. But hawkeyed readers who’ve been following these dates probably have an idea of where this is going.

Of course, at the time I couldn’t have known I was up against the clock. So I took the first few months of the year away from Pioneers, happy to just be done with that first step. In April I began my personal edits, though in retrospect I changed very little (besides tearing out an entire subplot, which was a very good idea). By this point, I had it all planned out. I’d start by submitting the novel to Pitch Wars, then begin querying in January. The Pitch Wars thing didn’t go overly well, but I was still committed to my plan by Christmas. I was filling my family in on my next steps around the breakfast table on Christmas Eve.

A few minutes later, my sister mentioned that a planned business trip to China had been cancelled, which we were all grateful for. I was concerned about the riots in Hong Kong, as well as a virus I’d been reading about. My sister was familiar with the virus, saying coworkers who’d been to China had talked about what locals called the “Wuhan Cough”.

By February, my plans…had changed.

My pandemic experience is pretty well-documented here on this site, but suffice it to say the pandemic had the same basic effect on my life it had on most people’s lives; if it didn’t kill you, it altered your life permanently. It was one of those ground-shaking events that created a “before” and an “after”. Before the pandemic, I was an office worker with dreams of writing. I had the corner office with the view, the job with a huge company. I had lunch twice a week on Fountain Square with my girlfriend, who also worked in a sad little box in a much larger, sad box.

Fast forward a year, and I was a remote worker. Jump forward to now, and I’m a partner, a suburbanite, a father. Whereas I used to spend every moment I could out somewhere and would get dressed up to go to Kroger, now I can’t remember the last time I wore anything but jeans unless I’m on a date. I spend most of my outdoor time in running shoes or hiking boots. I own exactly three shirts with collars that aren’t flannel. That transition was, to say the least, jarring. And as a result, for a while Pioneers didn’t feel as important. Hardly important at all.

But ultimately, my new life gave me a new imperative to get the ball rolling. So, three years ago, I began writing again. It was a very slow process, but I got through it. I began reading up on querying, watching the market trends, waiting for the right moment. It took years. But now, finally, here I am.

Pioneers has been a big part of my life. It, and the stories around it, are poised to become the work of decades, and already seven years of my life, or at least large parts of them, have been spent on this. I’ve bled onto these pages, pumped so much of myself into the work that I feel I might as well be querying my baby pictures (part of me thinks those would go over a lot better anyway). And now, at long last, I’m putting this story out there, and showing the world that I did this.

Good or bad, I did a thing. It was a big thing. A years of work, long nights and gallons of caffeine, agonizing over every detail, hair on fire kind of thing. And I feel good about it, regardless of how anyone else feels. If nothing else, I know I’m not done. Not by a long shot. I’ve got plenty more stories in me. So keep reading, and as always, dare to dream. – MK