Hello, dreamers. Last week I continued my work in short fiction, as well as research for my next novel project, Aquarius 1. However, over the course of the week I completed my transition period, and finally found myself able to look ahead to the rest of the year, and beyond.

Ultimately, I retooled my schedule for the rest of the calendar year, including planned short story submissions and my next round of queries for The Ursa Frontier (the title may be changing. Again.). I’ve begun a full assessment of all my writing efforts, including my platform. And big changes are likely on the horizon. With that said, here’s what I’ll be working on this week:

Aquarius 1

Another week of resisting the urge to dive straight into my work-in-progress, and I’ll call that a win.

Though I’m still reading up on the various periods of Earth’s Paleozoic, I’ve begun to realize this first phase of my research is nearly complete. I’ve learned a lot about the history of our planet’s oceans, all of which has been both fascinating and invaluable. This week I’ll be entering the next phase: building an alien biosphere.

As was the case with The Ursa Frontier, I’ll be helping myself by narrowing things down. In this case, the story will mostly be following three distinct ecosystems: coral reefs, kelp forests, and deep ocean benthic environments. While this is two more ecosystems than I featured in The Ursa Frontier, I’m confident that I can do this.

Everything starts small, so this week I’ll be studying marine invertebrates. I have a short list of distinct organisms, mostly ones that were once dominant in Earth’s oceans but now occupy narrow niches. In particular, I’ll be focusing on sea slugs and the evolution of arthropods and mollusks. While I’ve always been fascinated by marine biology, I’ll admit my knowledge of marine invertebrates is sorely lacking. It was only a few weeks ago that I learned the first true crabs didn’t appear in our fossil record until the middle of the Mesozoic.

The key here is understanding how and why marine invertebrates evolved as they did on our planet. Already in my initial research a year and a half ago I learned that sea urchins are likely absent from Thamiyn (the new name for the ocean moon). With that information in hand, I’ll be able to extrapolate how invertebrate life would evolve on a planet (or moon) with no dry landmass.

This week, I plan to cap off my initial phase of research with what I’m calling a “field trip”: after taking the family to the Museum Center last week to see the Ordovician exhibit, this week we’re going to a nearby fossil park, where hopefully we can come away with our very own pieces of Earth’s marine history. I’m sure they’ll look great next to all the others we’ve gathered over our many hikes through the past several years. If you ask me, you can’t have too many fossils.

Short Fiction

On Saturday night I wrote “The End” on another short story. That’s four in three weeks. Though I hesitate to say it, I think it’s now fair to say I’m on a hot streak. This week’s story, Filth, was particularly encouraging, as it was the first story in several weeks that was completely new (as opposed to a previously unfinished project). It was also my first sci-fi thriller in a while, and the first set in space since Going Dark years ago.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve settled into a comfortable rhythm. I spend a week or so working on a story, ideally completing the first draft on Saturday night and putting it aside for editing. On Sunday night I peruse my outstanding projects and write around, seeing if anything catches on. By Monday morning, I either have a project I’m ready to complete or I write a sketch that launches a totally new story. It’s fun, and I’m enjoying the groove.

While I did go ahead and edit my previous recent stories last week, for now I’m committed to forging ahead and leaving editing of the next batch for sometime in August, mainly due to my change in direction. As I mentioned in recent posts, this has already been arguably the most successful year in my (albeit brief) writing career. Finally receiving recognition to go with the steady stream of praise from fellow writers has me reassessing everything, in the mood to take bold swings.

For several years now, part of my weekly writing schedule has been a day devoted to short fiction. I’d previously switched between Saturday and Sunday (depending on whether or not it was college football season), before family time and socializing came to define my Saturdays, at which point I settled on Sunday. I’m ashamed to admit that over time it became a sort of grim ritual: once a week, I’d stare glumly at my slate of outstanding short fiction projects, wondering if I’d ever actually complete them.

Then, over the past few weeks, I started actually knocking them off.

My recent burst of confidence has left me more willing to criticize my own work. Not only have I been actually completing long-standing projects, but I’ve been heartlessly ditching others. My “Short Fiction Sunday” has become a serious task, as I carefully assess each unfinished story and decide whether or not I actually think this is worth writing. Perhaps part of the reason I’d kept some of these around so long was because I feared I couldn’t just come up with something better. Now, I’m pretty sure I can. So I’ve been spending Sunday nights swinging the ax.

Of course, this flurry of activity has left me itching to go out and sub some of my new stories, but I also did some long-overdue market research last week. Through that, I realized this time of year is perhaps the worst to try to sub short fiction to literary mags. In retrospect, not only should I have looked this up sooner, but frankly I should’ve been able to deduce it myself. For years I’ve subbed stories during the summer, nearly all of which were swiftly rejected, while stories I subbed during the winter or early spring often took weeks, or even months, to generate a rejection.

In any event, I realized there was little point in sending these stories off right away. I’d just be wasting bullets. I’d expected this to be disappointing, but honestly it took some pressure off my shoulders I hadn’t realized was there. Knowing I really shouldn’t be subbing right now has kept me from feeling like I’m on a time crunch, giving me some space to breathe and let the words flow. And when market conditions improve in late summer, I’m confident I’ll have a small library of quality short fiction to shop around.

Querying The Ursa Frontier

In the richest of ironies, my search regarding the best times of year to submit short fiction first produced hits relating to queries. Naturally I went ahead and read them, and as I mentioned in yesterday’s “Dear Sir or Madam”, turns out the same basic rules that apply to subbing short fic apply to novel queries. So even though most of my targets for my second round of queries remain open, I probably shouldn’t go ahead and start firing them off.

As with the news about short story subs, learning that I’m passing through probably the worst time of year to query ended up being a load off my mind. I immediately set aside all work on The Ursa Frontier. My new plan is to maintain my current writing routine through the rest of the summer: research and planning for Aquarius 1 combined with short fiction projects. I plan to resume querying and subbing short fiction around the end of August or early September, coinciding with the start of principal writing on Aquarius 1 (as well as the start of college football season, which will provide a pleasant distraction).

Now obviously I don’t plan to wait until the last minute to start working on my query materials. But for now, I feel there’s greater value in just stepping away from the project. After having poured so much mental and emotional energy into The Ursa Frontier, I’ll admit it’s been refreshing to put some space between myself and the project. However, I do have a few things I want to do before the end of the month. For one, I still feel the opening passages could be better; over the past month I’ve been doing a personal “first line challenge”, where I start every morning by trying to write the best opening line for a story I can. Also, I still don’t like the title. Something about The Ursa Frontier just doesn’t feel quite right. So before the end of the month, I hope to rework the opening paragraphs, and come up with a new title. And that, I think, will be enough.

Website and Platform

I know this has already been a lot longer than my usual “Writer’s Desk” posts dreamers, but bear with me. Because as I said, the past week has got me rethinking just about everything. That includes this website.

So a few weeks ago, I announced my intention to finally introduce a mailing list. I didn’t mention it last week because I ran into a snag: WordPress. As it turns out, the new service I found is a lot easier to use than MailChimp was. However, their integration with WordPress only works for a business plan. My research has suggested that WordPress’s rates for paid plans are a lot higher than many other web hosts. More than likely, this is due to their overall system, which makes it a lot easier to reach readers. But I’m starting to feel I may be outgrowing WordPress.

Now mind you, I have no plans to simply abandon this website any time soon. Even if (or likely when) I do find a new web host and launch a new site, I may retain this site, at least for a time. But I’ve long been frustrated with WordPress, particularly how limiting its templates are. It would be nice to find someone who’d give me a blank canvass to make my website what I’ve always pictured it as.

So in short, my plans for a mailing list are temporarily on hold and I’m now actively searching for a new web host. I am also looking into creating a space on Substack, and will keep you apprised of that process as well. Stay tuned.

New Content

This week in my “WIP Wednesday” post, I’ll be discussing the exhilarating, and consuming, process of creating a complete alien biosphere. On Friday I’ll be releasing my next a special “Sci-Fi Reviewed” post, in which I’ll be giving my first reactions to the first three episodes of the latest season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. And I’ll be closing out the week with a new “Dear Sir or Madam” post on Sunday. As I’m pausing querying for the rest of the summer, that post will serve as a reflection on what I’ve learned and accomplished on my querying journey so far, and will be the last “Dear Sir or Madam” post for the time being.

In its place, I will be adding a new weekly feature. Given how the past few weeks have gone, I’m considering resuming my long-defunct “Short Fiction Sunday” series of posts. There’s plenty more to come, so keep reading, and dare to dream. – MK