Hello, dreamers. So I had a busy week. I started a new short story, began editing on The Ursa Frontier, and started looking ahead to my next novel project.

This means I’ve now officially entered a transition period between projects. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be hopping around more, switching between projects while commencing research and note-taking, all while editing The Ursa Frontier. The second half of June is going to be hectic, but I’m looking forward to it. With that said, here’s what I’ll be working on this week:

Editing The Ursa Frontier

While my plan was to begin editing The Ursa Frontier last Wednesday, ultimately I waited until Friday. Early in the week I hit on a new short story, and wanted to focus on that for a few days to let the story establish itself before I brought in a second project. But I’m hard at work now.

As of this writing, I’m three chapters away from what is now the start of Phase 2 of the story. I’d hoped to get to Phase 2 tonight, but as I’d anticipated, it’s been slow going. I’ll be saying more about the editing process in this week’s “Pioneer Sessions” post, but suffice to say an edit this deep can be…involved. Formatting comes first, and even that’s been a slog. But the biggest focus of this edit is flow. While writing, it’s easy to ignore the flow of the story; you’re just trying to get all the words down, ideally in the correct order. You don’t always stop to consider how one sentence leads into the next, or the one after it. Word echoes crop up, you start reusing the same words because well, it just seems to fit, right?

So right now I’m looking at shortening or breaking up long sentences, changing transition words for variance. This time around, I’m also focusing on POV, making sure each line sounds like the current POV character is telling the story. It’s slow, exhausting work. I’m honestly amazed I’ve been able to edit three chapters per day.

The good news is that much of what I’m editing right now has been only slightly modified, and there are long stretches of that ahead of me, as well. The bad news is those stretches are interspersed with numerous completely new chapters. And while I did revise each of those chapters prior to inserting them into the manuscript, I’m sure problems will still arise.

At the moment, my loftiest goal for this week is to finish editing by Friday, and that’s an ambitious goal. Especially since this won’t be the only thing I’m working on this week.

My Next Project

As I mentioned, I’ve begun looking ahead to my next project, which will almost certainly be a fresh take on Aquarius 1. However, with everything else going on, I haven’t gotten much further than some vague ideas of what to change about the story, and a few lines of planned dialogue. Ideally, I’d like to do a test writing in the coming weeks, but I’m not going to rush into things. Especially not with editing on The Ursa Frontier still underway.

Thus, I plan to keep up with short fiction, and play it by ear over the next few weeks. This past week I began a new short story. Tentatively titled Distant Music, the story follows an NYPD detective in the missing persons unit, whose investigation of a famous composer’s disappearance reveals that artists across the world are being abducted by aliens for some unknown purpose. I’ve been taking it at a leisurely pace, partly to give myself tome time to wind down from The Ursa Frontier. I hope to finish the story by the end of this week, and then move on to…well, whatever’s next.

New Content

For weeks now I’ve been promising new content; a return to my weekly features, new “Dear Sir or Madam” posts. Amid work on The Ursa Frontier, it took bandwidth I simply didn’t have. I continued my “Pioneer Sessions” posts, but only because with The Ursa Frontier on my mind 24/7, it was very easy to write about that novel. And hard to write about anything else.

This week, however, I eschewed my weekly posts because, frankly, I was spent. I’ve learned the hard way how burnout can affect a writer. And so this time I’m trying something new: actually avoiding burnout, rather than just accepting its inevitability. By the end of the final draft of The Ursa Frontier, I could feel myself approaching the wall. I knew it was coming. So, rather than moving right in to the next phase of furious work, I gave myself a breather.

Though I kept working on short fiction, I let everything else fall away for a week. I watched TV shows. I read about the Pharaohs of Egypt. I caught up on my podcasts and agonized over my fantasy baseball team. And I do think it helped, a lot more than I’d expected it to.

So this week, I will finally be resuming my weekly posts, and will continue to post them from here on. Until then, as always, dare to dream. – MK