Hello, dreamers. With querying underway, at last I turn my full attention to my next work-in-progress.

As longtime readers will know, I originally began Aquarius 1 two years ago. At the time I was still working with a lot of the terrible writing advice freely available online, and it showed. It took far too long for me to realize the story I’d written from such an intriguing concept was turning out to be shallow, cinematic, and boring. And let’s be real: a story about the first human mission to an exomoon covered entirely in ocean, culminating in the discovery of an intelligent species of octopus, has no business being boring.

So, late last year I started over. I didn’t make it anywhere near as far, but it was a matter of quality over quantity. As I mentioned in previous posts, upon opening up my master file and reviewing what I’d written I was honestly surprised with how good it was. Still, I ultimately abandoned the story yet again last year, in favor of going back to Seven Days on Samarkand, beginning what would ultimately sprawl into a months-long process in which I completely rewrote much of the novel.

With Seven Days done (for now, at least), at last I’m free to return to Aquarius 1. But after a few months to think on this while conducting research, I came to a surprising decision: I’m starting over. Again. But there’s a good reason for this.

Aquarius 1

The prospect of scrapping a novel mostly (much less completely) written and starting over from scratch is enough to make most writers twitch. After all, it takes a lot of time and effort to write a novel, even a bad one. And good or bad, you did this. You invested your time and energy. You did a thing. It can be hard to just erase the board and start with a blank screen.

But sometimes, it really is the best option.

When I read a recent blog post by fellow author Autumn Baumann, I was overjoyed to find another writer (much less a very talented one) endorsing the practice of starting over. I’ve long been a firm proponent. I completely erased Seven Days on Samarkand twice before finally starting what became my first draft. And on that third attempt, I finally hit on the narrative I wanted.

The thing is, all the effort a writer puts into their work can cloud their judgement. I’ve found that if you’ve written a chapter (much less an entire novel) and try to make incremental changes, it’s too easy to just default to what you did before. This is fine becomes an uncomfortable mantra. And the more you look at something, the more you feel you can live with it. You start telling yourself it doesn’t really have to be any better. This is probably fine. And maybe it is. But if you’re about to put a novel out into today’s vast and shifting literary market, do you really want to step forward and offer something that’s just fine?

For me, the answer has always been a resounding “No”. If I know I can do it better, then by god I’m going to change it. But it’s too easy to just fall into the same pattern, and just end up writing the same basic thing over again. So I’ve found the best way to do it is to just trash the whole thing and start fresh. A blank screen gets me thinking outside the box. It frees me to consider directions I hadn’t before, when it looked like my only option was to just keep trundling down the same old road.

Now mind you, I don’t literally just take everything and throw it all away. Not right off, anyway. Because, as Autumn put it, there’s no value in reinventing the wheel. I take what I’d written previously and shovel it off into a different file. Now and then I’ll reach a point where I’m having trouble moving forward, and I’ll look back at the old passages. More often than not, I’ll find what I’d written before works best. At the very least I’ll find something salvageable, needing only minor changes to fit with the new piece.

Any time I start over, it’s always because I wound up with a fatal flaw that set the tone for the remainder of the piece. In the case of Seven Days on Samarkand, the opening kept feeling too formulaic: I was just going through the motions of every space colonization story ever written. “And they arrive in orbit, and they start landing people, and they start building things, and blah blah blah”. I find myself facing a similar problem with Aquarius 1: as it stands, the opening just feels too similar to the first chapters of Aquarius 1. The actual first chapter really hits, but after that, it’s just going through the motions. I know I can find a better way to do this.

So, when I resume work on Aquarius 1, I’ll be picking things up with chapter two. I still have no firm timetable to resume writing; currently I’m allowing myself to work on short fiction. I’m doing this to get myself “stretched out”, as I like to put it (longtime readers know how I love my baseball analogies). But when I do pick back up, probably sometime later this month, I’ll be starting with a blank slate. And honestly, I find that exciting. – MK