Hello, dreamers. Christmas is coming, and the goose is getting fat, as they say. I hope everyone is preparing to gather with family and friends to celebrate the end of a year. I myself have a lot to celebrate. More than in previous years. However, this year is not done.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s “Short Fiction Sunday”, the end of the year is always a time of big ideas for me. I’m looking ahead to a new year rife with potential, and that has me pursuing new directions with my writing, wondering what else I can do. Usually I spend the final few weeks of the year toying around with short story collections. But this year, my “Big Idea Season” has taken me in a completely new direction…

The Drum

Last week, after finishing my latest story (“On the Wire”), I went ahead and started a new one. The idea was a noir crime story set on a generation ship. However, partway through working on that story, I began work on another, related piece. Then another. I began doing background research into the generation ship itself: a McKendree cylinder, essentially an enormous ship filled with landscape, held to the cylinder by spin gravity. Ultimately, these stories came to occupy a shared timeline and setting, leading to a new story concept entirely.

The Drum will be a series of novellas and short stories set within the eponymous spacecraft. As of this writing, I’m hard at work on what will be the first story: the crew of the Drum is revived with almost none of their memories intact. With no idea of where they are or what they’re supposed to be doing, the revived crewmembers begin exploring the ship. Ultimately, after some classic space mystery and harrowing action, the crew will discover most of the ship’s memory has been wiped. With no knowledge of their original mission or hope of ever returning to Earth, the crew decides to build new lives for themselves within the drum. Essentially, they decide on a new mission: to build a civilization within the enormous starship, in hopes of one day fulfilling their original mission.

Though the idea for The Drum was loosely inspired by the Silo series by Hugh Howey, ultimately it’s a sort of ode to some of the towering classics of science fiction, drawing on elements of the Ringworld series by Larry Niven and Foundation by Isaac Asimov. The plan is for this to grow into a long-running series of short fiction pieces: my first attempt at serialized short stories. Through stories covering hundreds, or possibly thousands of years within their shared continuity, I intend to explore the evolution of the new human civilization within the Drum. Underpinning each story will be the efforts of every successive generation to finally deduce their ship’s original mission.

This is a bold undertaking on my part. For years, one of my favorite things about writing short fiction has been the freedom of allowing each story to stand on its own. I can make up background on the fly, knowing all of it will be meaningless when I move on to the next one. I get to leave the endings ambiguous, let the reader decide for themselves what happens next, because I know I’ll never need to tie up loose ends. But with The Drum, each installment will become the next’s history. I’ll admit I’m hesitant to give up the no-holds-barred nature of my short fiction work. But I can always go back to writing standalone short pieces. I don’t have to make every short story part of the continuity of The Drum.

As it stands, I have a clear idea of where the current installment is headed. With any luck, I’ll be able to complete it before Christmas. After that, I’m planning on moving right on to the next one. I’m nervous, but also excited to see where this takes me.

Short Fiction

As I mentioned, I did in fact finish my previous short fiction piece, “On the Wire”. It has yet to be edited, and for the moment I’m in no real hurry to do so.

The lack of urgency is due mostly to my current surplus of market-ready stories. Now that my critique group has finished their work, I have nine manuscripts ready for submission. Granted several of those are market-limited due to length, and several have already been rejected by the major markets. But that still leaves me with a vast surplus of stories I can shop around. And I have two more that require only modest work to get into shape.

So, while I plan to continue work on The Drum in the coming weeks, I’ll largely be shifting into submission mode. Over the next two weeks I’ll be doing market research, identifying targets for my manuscripts. My intention is to fire off my next round of submissions no later than January 2.

Querying Seven Days on Samarkand

This week I am effectively resuming query prep (I consider next Monday my “official” start). I’ll begin by coming over my query materials, starting with my query letter and sample pages (focusing on my “First Five”, as I’ve found that’s the sample size most agents request now). I feel good about this coming query window. Partly because of the feedback I received during the autumn window, but also because this time I have allies.

Starting this week, I’ll be turning over my full manuscript to my critique group. I hope to hold off on making any significant changes until at least two of them have had the chance to offer their feedback. It’s easy for a writer to start second-guessing a novel project, especially when they’ve spent a long time with it. I’ll likely give them some basic guidance regarding what I’m considering, and see if, upon reading, they feel the planned changes would help or be unnecessary.

Of course, asking people to critique a 10k-word short fiction piece is a far cry from asking them to read a 100k-plus novel. I’m not expecting to heard back from any of them in a week, especially during the holidays. So, either way I’ll be forging ahead with query prep next week. This week I’ll need to finalize my query strategy for the upcoming window. That leaves next week to do a deep dive on my target agents, reviewing their manuscript wish lists and putting together individualized query packages for each of them.

Upcoming Content

I’ve been considering several changes to this site. All would be relatively minor, however; mostly related to expanding on my current projects and streamlining my visual appeal. That said, here’s what you can expect on this site through the week ahead:

Wednesday: “The Drum“

In lieu of my “WIP Wednesday” post, this week I’ll be giving readers a fuller introduction to my new short fiction series. I’ll look at some of the stories that inspired this work, and give everyone a look at my current plan for the series.

Friday: “Science in Fiction: Islands in the Sky”

When most people hear the term “Space Colony”, the probably think of humans settling on alien planets. But to theorists, the term applies specifically to colonizing space itself. In this month’s “Science in Fiction”, we’ll take a look at space colonies: how they’ve appeared in science fiction, what science has to say about them, and how the modern sci-fi writer can faithfully depict an island in the sky.

Sunday: “Dear Sir or Madam”

As I begin query prep, my long-running “Dear Sir or Madam” series resumes. This week I’ll be looking at the query prep process itself, answering the question many readers are probably asking: just what the heck does a writer need to do before they query a novel?

It’s going to be another big week. So read on, and dare to dream. – MK