It’s week four of the Pioneer Sessions, and things have taken some wild turns.

For those unfamiliar with my annual writing schedule, late Spring is normally the start of my novel writing for the year. Starting in April, I review current projects, and select the novel I’ll devote most of my writing efforts to for the remainder of the year. Usually that involves revising and fleshing out concept notes, along with “test writings”, in which I experiment with scenes and dialogue, seeing if I’m ready to write any of the stories still in the planning stages.

That’s…how it’s supposed to go. This year has been a little different.

Week 4: A Tale of Two (or Three) Novels

Over the past week, I’ve kept working on Children of Other Earths, which will now be the next novel in the Pioneer series. Sort of, and I’ll get to that “sort of” in a moment.

While my background work has helped me to sharpen the immediate course of the series amid the changes made with The Ursa Frontier, I now find myself needing to work at the small scale. This is no longer a collection of short pieces; it’s a novel. Not only do those need an connecting narrative, they also need characters who persist throughout the story. Now that I’ve got Rand and Ford separated by light years, I need to start building new casts of characters around them (Ford especially). And I need to know who those characters are as people. I spent a lot of time on characterization for The Ursa Frontier. Now I need to do the same with this novel.

For better or worse, that means actual writing has slowed. I don’t like that, but I take solace in knowing I’d really like to just keep writing, and I’m forcing myself not to. But all the while, I’ve been working on another project: Castle Bravo.

As I mentioned in this week’s “Writer’s Desk”, I’ve decided to handle the process of splitting The Ursa Frontier in stages. Stage one is a fresh interiority sweep: diving deeper into the character’s minds and stories in a way I wasn’t able to before within the constraints of the soft limit on word count for debut authors. So far it’s going incredibly well, and also fulfilling my desire to keep up with actual writing.

I’ve been trying not to check the word count obsessively (as I did originally), but I have clear goals in mind. Currently, I’m considering 82,000 words my “goal posts”: it’s the rough word count of Leviathan Wakes, the first novel of the Expanse series. The story was hard sci-fi, multi-POV, heavy on interiority, so I feel it’s a good yardstick to measure my work. The way I’m looking at it, if I can get to around 82-84k, that’s good, and probably a sort of “sweet spot”. If I can get in under 100k, that would be idea. If I somehow run beyond 100k, as long as I’m not too far over it’ll probably be fine. Especially since I’m confident I’ll be presenting a much better finished product. However, I’ve made it through phase 1 and the first couple chapters of phase 2, and I’ve added a total of about 1.5k. So frankly I don’t think there’s much chance of running over 100k. I may, in fact, end up adding additional action scenes or subplots to fill things out.

This is, of course, another consuming project. After I finish all the new material, I’ll still need a fresh editing pass. I’ll then need to completely rewrite my synopsis and query letter. And of course, all of this could end up being moot. I’m not convinced this novel would work better as two books instead of one. But I’m not a literary agent. Any one of the agents I’ve queried thus far could look at The Ursa Frontier as it is, and love that it’s fast-paced and does a lot within 115k words.

And if I do, in fact, plunge ahead with this, the same process will need to be completed with the subsequent novel, built off what were originally phase 3 and 4 of The Ursa Frontier. As it turns out, those portions of the book are even shorter than the first two.

A guy could go mad with all this. I’ve been trying not to spiral while thinking of the ripple effect this massive change will have on literally everything. Ideally, I’d like to accomplish everything I’m planning with the first book in about four weeks, at which point I’ll be past the latest response time quoted from the agents I’ve queried. From where I’m standing right now, wrapping everything including the query materials up in four weeks is optimistic to the point of fantasy.

So I’ve been trying to keep my focus narrow. Focus on the immediate work, let things happen in the order they should. And keep writing. For now, that’s enough. The rest will sort itself out. I’ll make sure it does. – MK