Hello, dreamers. I finally made it.

As of last night, principal writing on the final draft of The Ursa Frontier is complete. It’s been a long, hard road getting to this point. And I find myself torn between the relief of taking a few days away from the project and the compulsion to get back to it. But I need some space from this thing. For my sanity, if nothing else.

The result of this milestone is that this week will begin a slow transition as I move on from this project (at last) and on to something new. Of course, there’s still a lot of work to be done on The Ursa Frontier. And with that in mind, here’s what I’ll be up to this week:

The Ursa Frontier

So once again, the writing took a lot longer than I had anticipated. Once again, I found myself completing a chapter only to realize I still had more to say before wrapping everything up. But this week, I actually did it: I finished The Ursa Frontier.

So I’m going to take a day or two, or three, and inhale.

I’ll be talking more about the final wrap-up of the novel in this week’s “Pioneers Sessions” post. But for now, suffice to say things took a lot of twists and turns. I found myself diving more deeply into the thoughts and emotions of my characters, particularly the three who actually set foot on their new planet. Their experiences there changed them, and I feel I was finally able to explore that properly. I feel very good about what I’ve done.

But, of course, it’s not over.

After stepping away from the project for a few days to clear my head, either Wednesday or Thursday I’ll begin the final editing pass. And this one’s gonna be a doozy. In prior editing passes over the past year, things have moved quickly because I’ve been able to target my work. Having only made substantive changes to concise passages of text, I got away with abbreviated editing passes. But this time is different.

Over the past month, I’ve made sweeping changes to almost every portion of this story. That means I’ll need to perform a full line edit; my first since the initial draft. I’ll need to not only look at POV, but also continuity, and even grammar and usage. In some ways, this is a completely new story now. I need to treat it as such.

For better or worse, that means editing will be a much slower, more laborious task this time around. I’ve found through experience that, if I work on editing for too long at a time, I can get sucked into my own story and start looking at it as a reader, not an editor. That means I’ll need to break up my editing into concise sessions, and will likely only be able to handle three chapters a day at most.

Now, that may be a little pessimistic on my part; in areas of the story where I did only minimal work (disruption, injecting interiority, cleaning up POV), I can probably move through a lot faster. But in passages where extensive changes were made, I may also run into continuity issues (to say nothing of the completely new chapters). In some instances, this may require me to write entire replacement passages. So frankly, having this done within one week is ambitious.

But while I’m eager to get to my next round of queries (and hopefully get them out there before agents start shutting down for the summer), I’m unwilling to rush this. Having done all I’ve done over the past month, I find myself more comfortable with taking it slow, because I want to get this right. The last thing I want to do is put all this hard work into improving this story just to have it rejected due to typos, continuity errors, or formatting issues.

I’ll get it done. And in the meantime, I plan to take a moment to appreciate all I’ve accomplished before worrying about what comes next.

What Comes Next

Yeah, I didn’t believe me either.

So over the coming week, among other things, I’ll be looking for my next project. As I’ve mentioned recently, I’ve increasingly gravitated toward Aquarius 1. Perhaps it’s simply because, after working for so long with the characters of The Ursa Frontier, I’m eager to spend some time working on something totally different. But either way, I haven’t made a decision yet. I may not make a decision before the end of the week, or next week. But the process starts now.

I’ve written before about my annual writing schedule. But for the uninitiated, I typically devote most of the year from late spring to the end of the year to a novel project. The process begins with notes, as I start to hammer down the basic plot, characters, and setting. In my experience, every good story starts with two things: a basic premise and a main character. From there, the process is organic, as different aspects of the concept inform one another. The main character influences the plot, the plot influences the setting, other characters further develop the setting and plot, and influence the main character. Eventually, through it all, an initial concept emerges.

If I do go with Aquarius 1, the good news is that most of that work is already done. The bad new is that I’m not overly happy with most of it, beyond the main characters and overall plot. I may decide to simply scrap my entire concept notes file and start from scratch (I have enough of the basics nailed down in my head to do so).

In any event, at some point during the concept notes phase, I attempt some “test writings”. In these, I write out scenes or dialogue that are already very clear in my head. They become a sort of proof-of-concept, where I show myself that yes, I’m ready to write this. Usually, those disembodied scenes end up being incorporated into the actual story eventually, albeit in modified form.

All of that said, I’m probably at least a week away from test writings. In the meantime, I plan to resume my daily sketches. My sketches tend to lapse when I’m fully engrossed in a novel project, both because I’m already laying down over a thousand words of text per night and because I’m afraid of “poisoning the well”. Since I committed myself to writing every day this year (and every year from here on), and I typically do little actual writing on novel projects in the summer, I intend to devote the summer months to short fiction, and make that the norm from here on.

In the past, my sketches during the summer tend to be even more hit-or-miss than usual, emphasis on the miss. But if I can work out at least three short fiction pieces before the end of August, that would be tremendous progress.

New Content

Yet again this past week, The Ursa Frontier consumed my writing efforts. But with the principal writing complete, I’ll be back at it here on the sturdiest plank of my online platform.

My next “Pioneers Sessions” post on Wednesday will deal with tying up loose ends on The Ursa Frontier. I’ll be discussing work on the final chapters, and how I ended up pulling content from the original second half of the story to dive deeper into characterization. And starting this week, my weekly features will become “Friday Features”, which will be published at 11:30 AM every Friday. This week I’ll be reviewing All Systems Red by Martha Wells: book one of the Murderbot Diaries, which has now been adapted into an original series on Apple TV+. And I’ll be resuming my “Dear Sir or Madam” posts starting this Sunday.

One final note: I had teased a “surprise announcement” for last Friday in my previous “Writer’s Desk”. Astute readers will probably have noticed no such announcement was made. So, allow me to clarify.

As summer reading season approaches, I had intended to announce that I was self-pubbing my novella Prishelets, which recently won honorable mention in the “Writers of the Future” science fiction writing contest. The decision was made as I had run out of literary mags to submit to. However, out of the blue, Strange Horizons announced a very limited call for novellas last week. Strange Horizons is a speculative fiction magazine that offers extremely brief windows for submission. So I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

From what I can tell, their average response time is several months. That makes it unlikely I’ll be able to publish anywhere close to the summer reading season (and I’d even created a cover and blurb). But, rest assured, in the (likely) event that Strange Horizons passes on the story, I’ll have something really good ready for the holidays. Until then, dare to dream. – MK