Hello, dreamers. As many of you are aware, this past year I spent a good several months on a massive rewrite of Seven Days on Samarkand. This, of course, was mere months after my previous major rewrite. To non-writers, this may be confusing (writers reading this are simply nodding along). The obvious question is: “Well Mike, why didn’t you just do everything you needed to do in one go?”

The answer is simple: because I didn’t know I needed the second rewrite until I’d completed the first.

I often compare editing a novel to fixing an old car. Years ago, my best friend had a ’70s Dodge Charger he was working on. When I started helping him, the list of what was wrong with it was vastly longer than what wasn’t. Basically it went like this:

What’s Wrong

-Pretty much everything

What’s Not Wrong

-…I mean the wheels are fine

-And maybe the seats?

So he and I and three of our friends spent many eventful hours getting this car running (sort of). But as we went, I began to realize why it took so long: often times, we had to fix one problem for others to present themselves. For instance, when he first went to turn it over, it wouldn’t start. Turned out the battery was dead. We tried charging it. Turned out the battery was dead. We replaced the battery. Turns out the alternator was shot, too. Editing a novel is a lot like that. You start fixing problems, then you find new problems you hadn’t noticed before.

When I first began work on Seven Days on Samarkand near the end of last year, I had to undo a lot of the work I’d done over the previous several, when I’d been listening to a lot of really bad advice. First and foremost, I wanted to inject more interiority into the story. As I did, the word count ballooned, and I’d just gotten it down below 110k. I was nervous about the word count, but I ignored it; I knew what I needed to do. Once I’d delved deeper into the characters, I could shed needless words in editing.

After editing, I managed to pare the story down to a more or less marketable 115k. Not great, but for a multi-POV work of hard sci-fi it wasn’t that bad. Parts of it still felt rushed, but I forged ahead. The next problem didn’t really present itself until I sat down to write a query letter. I kept struggling to keep the word count down, but my best effort was still almost 450 words. Way too long, and I still felt I wasn’t adequately capturing the scope of the novel.

One good piece of advice writers come across in query prep is that your query letter can expose problems with your story itself. If you’re having trouble capturing your character’s motivations, they’re probably not clear enough. If it doesn’t sound like the stakes are high enough, your book might be too mellow. And if you can’t adequately capture the plot in less than 400 words, your story is probably too long.

And there was the next problem: the alternator, if you will. It wasn’t that I sucked at writing a query letter (I did, but that wasn’t the real problem). The real problem was that, frankly, I had too much plot. Too many transitions from one type of story to another. It was a shocking revelation: I’d essentially tried to cram two books’ worth of plot into one.

What followed was a pause in my querying (I’d fired off a small round of test queries, and nothing besides). I reluctantly abandoned my querying plans to focus on a project I dubbed “Castle Bravo”: splitting my novel in two.

Over several months, I engaged in without a doubt the most intense, expansive editing project I’d ever undertaken. First, I had to decide where to split the plot. Then I had to make sure each half could stand on their own. Once that was done, I found myself with an initial novel (originally the first half) that clocked in at around 76k words. I was shocked: suddenly I’d gone from having a book that was too long to having one that, for being a multi-POV work of science fiction, was probably too short.

But I knew what I needed to do, and finally I had the runway necessary to do it. I went back to the drawing board, revisiting my character notes. I dug deep into the characters, infusing the story with interiority. After diving into my characters I still had real estate to play with. So I revisited my notes and editing files, resurrecting subplots and scenes I’d discarded some time ago due to word count.

In the end, I was left with a slower-paced but much more engrossing story. The characters I’d spent so much time with had become people. And I was left with a much more concise, focused narrative. What had been a story about a group of colonists slowly exploring an alien planet, building their colony, settling into their lives, then dealing with calamity had become a gripping story about nature, exploration, survival, and recovery.

The resultant story is the one I’m querying now, and it feels good to believe I’m truly putting my best foot forward here. There’s no guarantee this is the final version of the manuscript; if this round of queries ends in no’s across the board, rest assured I’ll be revisiting it yet again late this year. But for now, I’m proud of myself for editing the hell out of my beloved story. I finally replaced that alternator. – MK