Hello, dreamers. I apologize for my conspicuous silence this week. I largely went dark, both here and on Twitter. But I did so for good reason:

I did it. I finished editing the final draft of The Ursa Frontier.

I dare say it went even better than I’d expected. I made notable changes, added another chapter, and the finished product clocks in at a comfortable 103k words. Now, here I stand, looking forward. This week will be a week of transition: I’ll be working on my query materials, but all actual work on the novel is finished. That means the time has come at last to look ahead to my next major project. But there’s a lot to do between here and there. So with that said, here’s what I’ll be working on this week:

The Ursa Frontier

My plan this week had been to slow-roll the editing on The Ursa Frontier, while also working on side projects and short fiction as well as my platform (which I’ve sorely neglected for the past few months). But around the middle of the week, something unexpected happened: I found myself sucked into my novel project one last time.

My expectation that editing would be a multi-week affair stems from experience. I’ve learned over the years that, when I’m editing a novel, I can’t do it in one sitting. I can edit a short story, or even a novella, comfortably in about a day. But while following the slower pacing of a novel, it’s too easy for me to get sucked into my own work. I start viewing the manuscript not as a writer but as a reader. Usually, I can tell when I get to that point because I stop making any changes, even minor ones.

But this time was different. Maybe I’m just getting better at this, maybe it helped that I broke up the editing into multiple sessions per day. Either way, things went much more smoothly. I found myself making thoughtful edits throughout the process. I found problem sentences and passages harder to ignore and easier to address. For the first time, I stopped looking at sentences that didn’t feel quite right and thinking “well, this doesn’t have to be that good,” and instead looked for ways to make it flow better.

I did, as I stated earlier, add one new chapter, simply to give more attention to an important character I’d glossed over previously. All in all, the biggest takeaway was that I was surprised at just how much I love this story now. And it wasn’t as though I’d hated it before. As my longtime readers will know, this story is very important to me. It’s my honest depiction of what I expect the future of humanity to look like; my hopeful message to the world. Now, more than ever, I think the world needs a little hope. And I’m eager to provide some.

Of course, the work isn’t completely done. This week I’ll be working on revising my query materials to reflect the sweeping changes I’ve made. But for now, I’m going to take a moment to sit back and breathe. I’d expected this moment to come as something of a letdown, realizing my time working on this novel has finally ended. But instead I’m elated, proud of what I’ve accomplished and eager to move forward.

Moving Forward

Once again, over the course of the past week I found myself sucked into The Ursa Frontier. But now, at last, that is behind me. I’m ready to move on to whatever comes next.

My first order of business this week will be to finish Distant Music. I have a firm idea of where I want to go with the story, and I’m happy with how it’s progressed thus far. It’s looking like this story will once again be on the long side, but as I’m just getting back into things I’m allowing myself to see where it goes. If all goes well, I’ll finish the story by midweek, and be on to the next one.

Once this story is complete (or perhaps before), I plan to write around a bit. I once again find myself with a number of outstanding short fiction projects. Many of them are stories I feel very good about, either due to the premise, the writing thus far, or both. And it would be nice to finally bump a few of them off, rather than letting them languish for another six months before I glumly move them to my “shelved” folder.

Though I plan to take a few days to decompress, by midweek I do plan to begin preliminary work on Aquarius 1. And that means starting from scratch.

I decided some time ago that when I did resume work on Aquarius 1, I’d be discarding everything I’ve written thus far and starting over. I want to do this not only because of the seismic changes to my writing style, but also because I realized the project had entered what I call a “tailspin”.

As longtime readers will know, I tend to reason through writing using metaphors largely gleaned from either baseball or aeronautics. And I’ve found writing a novel is a lot like building a Major League Baseball team. It takes time and patience, you have to have the right pieces, and a clear path from start to finish. But the fact is, even if you have a clear, intriguing plot and great characters, sometimes it still just doesn’t work. When I find myself dissatisfied with the direction of a novel project, I often end up going off on odd tangents. I add bizarre quirks to characters, add characters that have no business in the story. I start juggling around plot points, introducing flashbacks and other continuity mistakes. Eventually, the story starts to spiral out of control: it enters a tailspin.

At that point, while the premise, plot, and even characters might still work, there’s no way forward. Any moderate modifications or additions amount to nothing. It’s unrecoverable. This has happened to me many times before. I’ve tried twice to write the original planned first installment of the Pioneer series, Pathfinder. It took several tries before I got The Ursa Frontier right. Now, I think it’s time to start over with Aquarius 1.

Much as was the case with The Ursa Frontier, I don’t think everything I’ve written in Aquarius 1 is totally unsalvageable. The plot is well-defined, original and intriguing. And overall I really like the major characters. But I think a complete rewrite is needed. So this week I’ll be starting with the basics. I’ll be going over my notes on characters and setting, questioning everything.

If all goes well, I hope to begin test writings within the week. But as I’ve learned, writing never follows a straight line, no matter how badly I want it to.

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.

But 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