Hello, dreamers. At long last, I’m approaching the end. I’ll have completed principal writing on the final draft of The Ursa Frontier by tonight.

The finish line is in sight.

Of course, I’d originally planned to have this done by the end of last week. But in the end, the story decides how long it should be. And as I dug into things late last week, I realized I had a lot more story to tell than I realized.

Plugging the Holes

So, in the original version of The Ursa Frontier, the major plot of the third and fourth phases of the novel revolved around Randall Holmes and his companions setting up a biological research outpost apart from the main settlement on Samarkand. I spent a lot of time depicting Holmes and company setting up the outpost, building, learning about their new biosphere.

And yet, I said almost nothing about how it started.

Obviously, this isn’t the sort of thing that would just…happen. There would be meetings on the subject. Choosing a site would be a topic for debate. But I paid it all lip-service, compressing all that backstory into all of one paragraph.

To be fair, looking back I made that decision due to word count constraints. Sacrifices had to be made. But as I’ve worked to inject more interiority into this story, altering the pacing, I realized I now had the ability to dig into things more.

Now, the closing chapters of The Ursa Frontier manage to show how all of this came together. And I love how it’s turned out. I’ve managed to add excellent dialogue, delve deeper into Holmes’s emotions. And letting Holmes and the administrative board plan and decide gave me time to split the main characters up, letting them explore their own feelings while Holmes is busy.

This story has been the work of years. It’s been a labor of love, but as with all love, at least the good stuff, the nature of it has changed over time. Diving past the how and into the why, I managed to transform a group of compelling and likeable characters into a cast of complex, messy people. Randall Holmes isn’t just a heroic figure haunted by his past; he’s a man who secretly regrets none of it, and feels guilty for wanting to do it all again. Nina Stark isn’t a sheltered engineer whose heart is melted by the Big Strong Hero; she’s a strong, career-driven woman, who isn’t sure she’s willing to throw everything away for a man. And William Ford isn’t just the loveable, nerdy third wheel; he has his own life and his own friends, people who love and care about him.

From the start, I wanted to make this novel something far too rare in science fiction, even today: a truly, deeply human story. A story that wasn’t about futuristic technology or Martians and lasers, but about people. And over the past few months, the story did something it hadn’t done since I wrote the first draft: it took on a life of its own.

I still have a lot of work to do. Over the coming week I’ll be working on my query materials and editing. That last part, in particular, I expect to take the better part of a week or more. I may not be able to get my queries out before agents begin closing for their summer hiatus. But I’m no longer bothered by that. Because I know, now more than ever, that I’ll be putting my best work out there.

So if you’re a literary agent reading this, get ready. I’ll shake you windows. I’ll rattle your walls. – MK