Hello, dreamers. It’s been five weeks since I sent out my first round of queries for The Ursa Frontier. I haven’t received any responses yet, and with the holiday coming up I’m not confident I’ll receive any this week. But at this point, no news is good news. Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself.

Amid the waiting, work continues apace. I find myself working on two projects at once for the first time in years, and I’m surprised by how much I’m enjoying it. The process feels natural, like it’s supposed to be happening. That said, here’s what I’ll be working on this week:

Children of Other Earths

Over the past week, I was reminded of something I read years ago, in which Frank Herbert was describing the process of writing the first three Dune novels. He mentioned that he worked on the second and third novels simultaneously: he’d do some work on Dune Messiah, then pivot to Children of Dune, and so on. At the time, I was amazed that he could keep all of that straight.

But now I get it.

Amid mid-query changes to The Ursa Frontier, I’ve been working on that novel and Children of Other Earths concurrently. It’s not something I’d planned, but much like a lot of what I’ve been doing in writing over the past month, it just sort of happened. I began to realize the two projects flow with one another, forming a cohesive narrative. Changes to one will impact the other.

So I’ve embraced the chaos, and through it I’ve found a semblance of order. At the moment, much of the work on Children of Other Earths has been devoted to character development and fleshing out the overall plot. As with past novels, I have a lot of ideas for plot points, and will need to narrow things down as I go. Timeline continues to be an ongoing issue: though I have a clear sequence of events for the overarching series, I must now decide just where, exactly, to cut this novel off. What to save for the next installment.

April, as I’ve said, it the start of my novel-writing cycle each year, and it and May are months for concept building. So I’m not rushing the writing. But I’ve still been jotting down the odd bits of characterization, interiority, and dialogue. All I need to do is decide just where to put them.

Querying The Ursa Frontier

As I mentioned earlier, it’s now been five weeks since my first queries went out. That means I could start hearing back from prospective agents any day now. I’ll admit to feeling impatient. Between the plans I have for changes to the manuscript and the agony of waiting, there are days when I’d settle for a response that’s just a large picture of a raised middle finger. But modern literary agents are extremely busy people. They’ll respond. Most of them will, at any rate. Eventually.

That said, I’ve kept working on my “Castle Bravo” project. I’m currently about halfway through what I’m calling my “interiority sweep”. Basically, I’m allowing myself to dive deeper into the story where before I’d held back due to the word count. I’d anticipated this would significantly lengthen the story. But so far, my efforts have added, I believe, around a thousand words of text. If that. So I still have a lot of work to do.

One of the more interesting recent developments is my ability to actually see this as its own concise novel, rather than half of one. Just last night, I realized I was working on what is now the climax of the novel: a tense, grisly scene in which the main characters have their first brutal run-in with the Cretaceous organisms of their new planet. Looking at this event and seeing it as a clear climactic moment has only fueled my dedication to splitting this into two novels before the next round of queries.

I’ll likely be finished with my interiority sweep (the first one, anyway) by mid-week. At that point, I’ll check the word count, and then start looking at further expanding the novel. That will mean adding new plot points, which will have a ripple effect on the subsequent novel. I’ll need to account for everything I add when moving on to the next installment.

So once again, I find myself making changes that will further influence everything that comes after. But I feel very good about what I’m doing now. I’m getting a better feel for who the characters are; how they think, how they feel. And that means the readers will understand the characters better, too.

New Content

On Wednesday, I’ll be discussing both the new novel and the Castle Bravo project. Also, watch this Thursday for my next “Sci-Fi reviewed” post. However, there’s a major change coming to this site.

In order to increase readership, starting next week I plan to put out more posts on weekends. I’ll be shifting my Thursday Features to Saturday, and all subsequent “Dear Sir or Madam” posts will be published on Sundays. Until then, dare to dream. – MK