WIP Wednesday

Hello, dreamers. With MERIT 19 behind me (maybe), I’ve turned my attention to the next novella on my list. It’s turned out to be a bigger and more rewarding experience than I’d expected, and I can’t wait to tell you about it. So take a look:

Endurance

Yep, I even created a mission patch. So, longtime readers may remember that I released a short story some time ago titled Poseidon here on Writing Tomorrow. They may also remember it as being bland, rambling, maudlin, and far too long. And for that, I apologize.

I first got the idea for Poseidon years ago while doing background research for Pathfinder (the planned prequel to Pioneers). Originally meant as merely a background piece, I was fascinated with the idea of the Poseidon DSV: a spacecraft propelled by a ten-kilometer wide solar sail, taking two years to travel from Earth to Jupiter. I loved the idea of humans spending years in space just going somewhere. I began to think about what their lives would be like, how much things can change in just one or two years.

However, as I’ve mentioned, Turn of the Century was originally meant to be a collection of short stories. Turns out, it’s extremely difficult to write a story spanning two years in 7,500 words or less. So I ended up glossing over a lot of important things, focusing on the romantic storyline. I like romance. I write romantic subplots. But this one just didn’t work. It felt corny. The characters, who I couldn’t hope to fully develop, felt hollow.

And the hell of it is, the story still ended up well over 10,000 words.

So I left it as it was for a while. After writing one of my most intriguing story ideas, I turned away from the results in disgust. I wanted to write a fascinating story about years spent just going somewhere. Instead I ended up writing Wuthering Heights in space. And the hell of it is, try as I may, I still couldn’t find a way to make the story better. I began to see it as irredeemable.

When I began work on Turn of the Century, it was the first time I gathered all the stories together and took a good look at them. And immediately I saw a problem: nearly all the main characters were male. In fact, nearly all the characters were male, main or not. This was unacceptable; the future of the Dotiverse is one where gender, racial, and sexual inequality are things of the past. Just on percentages alone, it made no sense that the majority of astronauts would be male. So I set to work gender-swapping.

The two main characters of Poseidon, Todd Helfrich and Narendra Patel, were both male. They were also romantically involved. So, I decided to make them both female, instead. And the fact is, I didn’t like Todd Helfrich any better as a woman than I did as a man. But I tried to trudge on. Until something stopped me: Dauna Adkins spoke.

You see, the initial changes included transforming Todd Helfrich into Dauna Helfrich. But as I began fleshing out the story, writing new passages, I began to realize that Dauna wasn’t just Todd with makeup. She was someone new. Todd was shy and emasculate, without a doubt more of a parody of a gay man than I’d intended, much to my discredit. But Dauna was better. She was driven, intense, irreverent, and joyless. She was bad with people but good at her job. She was a runner. She was a fighter. And she was much more interesting.

After a brief attempt at continuing, I decided to go back and start over. Everything changed. Instead of a story about a timid, unimposing man enjoying life in space, I found myself writing an edgy, aggressive story about the realities of long-duration space travel. And I believe the story is much the better for it. As of last night, Endurance is complete, standing currently (precariously, before editing) at around 17,700 words. I plan to edit the book tomorrow, then it’s on to books two and three. – MK