Hello, dreamers. We are now halfway through the third week of National Novel Writing Month 2025. It’s crunch time; writers across the world are checking their word counts, adjusting projections, and deciding just how much sleep they’ll need to lose over the coming week and a half.

Last night, I began the next chapter of my work-in-progress. A lot is changing, and while NaNoWriMo will end soon, my work on this book will not. Even if I meet my word goal. So here’s the latest, and the outlook on the week ahead:

Aquarius 1

After the harrowing chapters I wrote last week and over the weekend, the latest chapter felt like a breath of fresh air. I’ve skipped ahead by about a month; long enough for the crew to have moved on from the events of the action sequence, and to have settled into their new lives aboard the Challenger.

The coming chapters will shift things around considerably. I’ll be moving from exploring Karen’s past and interiority to pushing her to the foreground, showing her in her element as a marine biologist. Anita will actually be leaving the ship to engage in a harrowing repair mission.

While there are still elements of these characters to explore, at this point I’ve gotten most of the big stuff out of the way. Readers will have a firm sense of just who these two women are. That means the coming chapters can be devoted the fun stuff: hard science, problem solving, discovery and adventure. That’s all firmly in my wheelhouse, so despite my plan to split the POV characters up, I still believe the coming chapters will go much faster than those before them.

At last, this story is becoming what I’ve always wanted to write: a story of exploration. Capturing the human spirit and translating it into a generation more advanced and sophisticated than we can truly understand. I enter the home stretch of November excited by what lies ahead, with a clear picture in my mind of the coming chapters; how they’ll proceed, how I’ll use them to set up subsequent events, and where this is all headed. And my god I cannot wait. – MK