Hello, dreamers.
I’ve been silent for the past month. For that I apologize, but given what I’ve been up to, I felt it necessary to fully immerse myself in writing. Now and then, I find it important to pull back and shake things up. It’s too easy to fall into a routine, lose myself in this site, Twitter, and all the other vital but often distracting facets of creating a writing platform.
That said, I’m ready to get back at it here. So, allow me to fill you in on what I’ve been up to, where I’m headed next, and what to expect in the coming weeks and months here on Writing Tomorrow:
My Month of Silence
After my last regular posts, I began to realize the task of reworking parts of Pioneers was much bigger than I’d originally believed. Research led me down new and interesting avenues, and led to a few pretty jarring revelations. Chief among them was this simple realization:
Pioneers is a multi-POV story.
After listening to a number of episodes of the podcast The Shit Nobody Tells You About Writing, I started looking at Pioneers differently. As many longtime readers will know, the opening of Pioneers is something I’d struggled mightily with for a long time now. I kept telling myself “I can’t start the novel like this; Randall Holmes is the main character. But after hearing several writers pitch their multi-POV stories, I began asking a question: what if Randall Holmes is a main character, not the main character?
And that was one of those glass-shattering moments that changes everything. After all, it’s not like I actually just crumple up the crew of the Susan Constant after the opening chapters and just throw them away. They may not continue to be central to the story, but they keep popping up. Much of Phase 2 of the novel bounces back and forth between Holmes and his companions on the surface of the planet and the crew aboard the Constant. So, maybe I’ve written a multi-POV story.
With that in mind, I began researching multi-POV, and realized I’d gotten a lot wrong about just what, exactly, it entails. Turns out, multi-POV stories don’t always need to follow one or two main characters around. Turns out it’s not only acceptable, but in fact a good idea to periodically push characters to the background and focus on new ones. In other words, turns out I’d actually done most of what a writer should do in a multi-POV story.
In an instant, everything changed. Now I find myself enriching the story, getting into the heads of multiple characters instead of trying desperately to shove Randall Holmes in the reader’s face. It’s a work that’s still in progress, but I’m very happy with the results so far. And the work is also taking into account another revelation:
Pioneers probably isn’t sci-fi enough.
So much of what I read going into Pioneers basically said to keep worldbuilding to a minimum, keep it from getting too wildly sci-fi. Don’t describe too much. Don’t explain too much. So that’s what I did. And I created a great story, but one that really don’t stand out as much as I’d like. Then, over the past month I spent some time reading for comps. And what I began to realize is there was a lot more room for Martians and Lasers.
For the uninitiated, “Martians and Lasers” is my personal shorthand for the classic sci-fi elements. Cool technology, space battles, robots, aliens, etc. What I’ve come to realize is that minor elements of technology, like personal electronics and such, are key to defining a sci-fi story. They’re what separates your novel from all the other sci-fi stories out there. I had plenty of ideas on the subject, but had purposefully refrained from talking about them in the novel.
So, just like that, I feel I’ve been given a pass to make Pioneers more me, for lack of a better way of putting it. The more I read into all of this, the more I realized there was an opportunity to tell a much better story: the one I’d originally set out to tell. And as multi-POV novels are expected to be longer, my previous massive edits have left me with ample real estate to stretch this story out and make it what it’s supposed to be.
So that will be my major project for the next several weeks. But there’s a lot more to come…
What’s Next
Over the coming month, I have four major goals in my writing:
- Finish reworking Pioneers
- Publish book one of Turn of the Century
- Begin querying Pioneers
- Re-start writing on Aquarius 1
in essentially that order. My current plan is to publish Endurance (Turn of the Century, book one) a week from Friday. As this will be a series, I feel I don’t need a ton of hype or pre-ordering. As it’s a Kindle exclusive, I’m not permitted to post teasers. But I’d still like to give myself this week and next to get back at it here on the website.
Speaking of which, I will likely be taking a light schedule this week, then resuming my weekly posts next week, starting with my next regularly-scheduled “Writer’s Desk” on Monday. I will be introducing at least one new feature: sci-fi book reviews, informed by my recent comps research. I will be resuming posts regarding the Dotiverse, and (eventually) my weekly flash-fiction.
But this past month has been restorative. In addition to throwing myself back into Pioneers, I’ve allowed myself to pursue new ideas and potential projects. I’ve let my mind wander. I’ve watched baseball, started running again. Now and then, everyone needs to take a moment to inhale. And with my month of silence behind me, I’m ready to start breathing out into the world again.
So until next time, dare to dream. – MK
Writing Tomorrow 