Hello, dreamers. I had another productive week, and as I’ve continued this recent stretch, I’ve begun rethinking a lot of things.

My recent successes have me looking more critically at almost every aspect of my writing life: my platform, existing projects, future projects, everything. Upon reflection, I’ve come to believe I spent so long spinning my wheels, clinging hopelessly to long-dormant short fiction projects and a stale platform, simply because I didn’t believe I could do any better. I believed I had peaked.

This year so far has changed that.

Now, for the first time in years, I find myself looking at things like updating my platform and starting new projects not with dread but wild anticipation. I’ve done mountains of research into the actual business of writing I’d back-burnered for years. And the more I dive into this, the more eager I am to forge ahead. This is new. This is good.

I have a lot ahead of me, both in this final week of July and in the month that approaches. And I can’t wait to get at it. That said, here’s what I’ll be working on this week:

Aquarius 1

After spending some time researching invertebrates last week (which was, frankly, not as much fun as I’d hoped it would be), this week I’m moving on to vertebrates. And when planning a biosphere on a moon that’s never had dry landmass, that means one thing: fish. Lots and lots of fish.

Thus, my first order of business this week will be a deep dive into the evolution of fish. As was the case with invertebrates, I need a better understanding of not only how but why fish evolved as they did on our planet. Earth’s oceans were once dominated by giant fish covered in bony plates of armor, but now they’re extinct. What happened to them? I need an answer to that question and many others.

With August approaching, I’ll also be expanding the scope of my work on Aquarius 1. First and foremost, I’m going to finish going over what I’d written last year before putting the project aside to work on The Ursa Frontier. I began that process at the start of this month, before pausing because I felt the overwhelming urge to just start writing again without doing the research first. But, as I mentioned all those weeks ago, my biggest takeaway was that actually most of it looks really good.

No doubt I’ll find a lot more to change further on, but for now I’m happy with what I’ve seen, and no longer fear I’ll need to start entirely from scratch. And that’s a huge relief. If all goes well, I’ll be able to wrap up biosphere research within the next few weeks, and I might be back to writing by the end of next month.

Short Fiction

Once again, on Saturday night I wrote “The End” on a short story. This week’s story, Guess I’m Everyone, was an outstanding project, but unlike others that had sat neglected in their own files for months (or years), I found this gem buried in my daily sketches. Somehow it’d gotten lost in the shuffle.

I only found it because of my renewed efforts to audit my extant projects. After combing through my existing project files over the past few weeks, last Saturday I actually sifted through my daily sketch file. I’d written the first few paragraphs of Guess I’m Everyone back in early May, and had completely forgotten about it. To me, this underscored the value of keeping better track of my projects. Sifting through my sketches also yielded what will be my story project for this week: The Vitruvian Men, which revolves around a geoengineer undergoing gene therapy to live on an exoplanet with significantly higher gravity than Earth.

After completing Guess I’m Everyone last night, I read through what I had of The Vitruvian Men, and this evening I started work. Hopefully I’ll once again end the week with a newly-completed story. However, this morning I also made a big decision: more than likely, The Vitruvian Men will be my last short story for a little while. Possibly my last until October.

As I enter August, I’m once again going to be shifting gears. Summer will be ending, and novel season approaches. I have a lot to do between now and then, much of it things I’ve been putting off for far too long; things that, frankly, I should’ve done before I began querying back in March. So while I will certainly keep up with my daily sketches, and may indeed keep writing short fic, much as I hate it I won’t be focusing on short fiction for the time being.

As such, I’m going to be entering a brief editing phase. Over the coming week, I’ll begin working my way through my backlog of existing projects. I’m going through everything, even manuscripts I’ve already subbed to a couple mags. The hope is that, once I resume submissions either late next month or in early September, I’ll have a deep bench of fresh manuscripts to pull from.

In the past, I typically edited short fiction pieces in a day or so. Over the past year as my writing style has evolved, I’ve found it’s often a multi-day process, and I now have six (hopefully soon to be seven) manuscripts to edit. The process could take several weeks. If, by then, I’m still not ready to resume principal writing on Aquarius 1, who knows? I may knock out another short story or two in August.

Querying The Ursa Frontier

A very brief note: as I mentioned in last week’s “Dear Sir or Madam”, I am officially stepping away from querying for the remainder of the summer. Based on everything I’ve read and heard over the past few weeks, I fail to see the value in just firing off queries haphazardly to weary or vacationing agents who probably aren’t all that enthusiastic about evaluating a new project just now.

Also, as I mentioned last week, when I made that decision I did give myself two tasks to complete with The Ursa Frontier before the end of July: rework the opening lines, and come up with a new title. Well, for whatever reason it turns out I actually started Guess I’m Everyone twice, in two separate files. Why I did this is anyone’s guess; in early May I was mulling over the idea of reworking The Ursa Frontier, so I suppose I was probably more than a little…scattered. In any event, the first opening was pretty good. But the second was awesome. And I quickly realized it would’ve worked great as the opening paragraph of The Ursa Frontier.

So, I called an audible and cannibalized it. I re-inserted the original opening lines of Guess I’m Everyone and rewrote the (much better) second opening to become the opening paragraph of The Ursa Frontier. So that’s one task down. As for the other, I already have a long and growing list of possible titles, and just today I actually narrowed the list rather than adding to it. So that’s progress. I’m confident I’ll have a new title before Thursday.

Website and Platform

Among the many reasons I’m planning to step back from short fiction over the coming weeks is the need to work on my platform. This is one of those tasks I’d dreaded and put off for some time now, but now I feel up to the task.

After some initial research into web hosts for writers, I’ve decided that, for better or worse, I’m likely better off sticking with WordPress for the time being. It offers more of the functionality I need at my current stage of writing. However, I plan to give this site a long-overdue facelift over the coming weeks.

As my partner (a web designer) is wont to point out, websites must be periodically updated to keep up with current trends. Among the improvements I have planned are changes to optimize my site for mobile viewing (currently I still have a lot of pages formatted for computer), and an increased focus on my blog posts. I’m also looking into creative new ways to share free short fiction content without opening myself up to piracy.

Lastly, after a great deal of consideration, over the coming weeks I’ll be launching a SubStack profile. Watch for an announcement when the time comes, and follow me there for additional content.

New Content

This week in my “WIP Wednesday” post, I’ll be filling readers in on the latest developments in my efforts to produce an alien biosphere. On Friday I’ll be releasing my next “Science in Fiction” post: a long-running series in which I discuss how modern science can help inform science fiction in an increasingly science-literate world. I’ll be closing the week out on Sunday with a new weekly feature, which will replace my ongoing “Dear Sir or Madam” post series for the time being. Until then, dare to dream. – MK