Many, I wish I could write faster. I probably can, but there are times when writing is an uphill slog, and you can’t put your foot on the accelerator too hard or your tires will spin out.
Right now, I’m about halfway through Star Wolf (formerly HEART OF THE NEBULA), and I’m in the part of the manuscript that needs the most work. I’ll probably be throwing out 60%-70% of what’s in there now and rewriting it from scratch, at least until the last five chapters. That’s not the hard part, though–the hard part is untangling the storylines that need to be kept from the storylines that need to be thrown out. I’ve already outlined the basic structure, but for the next couple of chapters, I’ve decided to abandon my revision notes. Now, everything is murky.
So that’s what I’ve been up to in the last few days. Star Wolf is a novel in the Gaia Nova series, and will probably end up around 120,000 words or so. That’s around the same length as Bringing Stella Home, or perhaps a bit longer. Definitely a change of pace from the novellas I’ve written in the last couple of years. As much of a slog as it is now, though, it’s got a lot of good stuff in it. Action, adventure, political intrigue, hard moral choices–not to mention space battles, generation ships, and cryonics gone horribly right.
But really, I want to get this one finished so that I can work on Sons of the Starfarers Book II: Comrades in Hope. I’m so excited about this one, I’m thinking about putting Star Wolf on hold for a few weeks so that I can just write it. Of course, a few weeks will probably turn into one or two months, and by the time it’s finished I’ll want to move immediately on to book 3.
Which actually might not be a bad thing, since I want to launch Sons of the Starfarers as soon as I can. It seems like you guys have really enjoyed Star Wanderers, so I think that you’re going to enjoy Sons of the Starfarers even more. I’m already getting the feedback from my first readers for Book I: Brothers in Exile, and while there are a few minor fixes to make, the story itself seems pretty solid. And the places I want to go with this series … man, it’s going to be awesome.
Just to give you a taste, here’s an excerpt from the first chapter of Brothers in Exile. Isaac and Aaron have just arrived at a derelict station on the fringes of settled space, light-years away from the nearest human being.
“So this is Alnilam station,” he mused as he peered out the forward window. The station’s hull was a dark gray, the beacons at the ends of the antennae a deep flashing red. Though it shone a little as it reflected the stars, their light was too dim to give anything more than the basic shape of the structure. On the inside of the wheels where the windows should have been, there was a blackness as dark as the night on the planet below.
“I’m picking up something,” said Aaron.
“Is it a transmission?”
“No, it’s something else. Radiation signatures, concentrated mostly at the hub.”
Isaac’s heart fell. “That would be one of the station reactors, probably leaking fuel or coolant internally.” Proof that no one’s alive in there after all.
“Well, it can’t be that big, since the wheel engines are obviously still working. And I’m only picking up radiation immediately around the reactors, so it’s not like it’s leaked down to the rim. If anyone’s still alive—”
“They can’t be. If they were, they would have fixed the leak.”
Aaron bristled. “How do you know that? For all we know, the engineers are gone and none of the survivors knows what to do about it.”
“If there are any survivors, why haven’t they hailed us?”
“How should I know? All I know is that it’s possible. You can’t refute that.”
I guess I can’t, Isaac thought. Instead of admitting that, though, he kept silent, peering at the ghostly derelict as if lost in thought.
“We should dock and go in there,” said Aaron. “Peek inside, take a look around. Even if there aren’t any survivors, maybe we can at least find out what happened to them.”
“Are you crazy?” said Isaac, his heart beating a little faster at his brother’s suggestion. “We have no idea what’s in there. For all we know, the place is infested with some sort of disease.”
“So we go in EVA suits and take a quick sterilizing spacewalk before coming back. No big deal.”
“It’s still a dumb idea. We’re not going.”
Aaron scowled and rolled his eyes. “So what, you just want to turn around and leave? Abandon this place without finding out what happened?”
“That’s right. We know that the station is dead, and that’s enough.”
“But we don’t know that,” said Aaron, raising both of his hands. “We don’t know hardly anything. All we know is that no one has answered our transmissions and there’s a small reactor leak at the hub, but everything else looks fine.”
It does not look fine, Isaac thought to himself. His palms felt clammy, and he was already beginning to regret his decision to come to this system at all.
“Listen,” Aaron continued, “even if there aren’t any survivors, maybe we can find some fuel and supplies to make this trip worthwhile. It’s more than a parsec to the nearest settlement, and even if we go straight there we’ve already burned through so much that we’ll have to sell half our cargo hold just to resupply.”
That much was true. Even with the credit they’d built up around this sector, they’d be dangerously low on fuel if they turned around now. The Medea was a small ship, and it could take them almost a year to make up their expenses if they cut their losses now. Still, the thought of setting foot on that derelict made Isaac’s skin crawl.
“It isn’t safe,” he muttered. “Whatever happened here, we shouldn’t get involved.”
“But we are involved,” said Aaron. “We’re involved just by being here. And since we’re already involved anyway, we might as well find out what happened to these people so that we can get their story out. They deserve that much.”
That’s right, Isaac thought. They certainly do.
“Okay, I’ll bring us up to one of the rimside docking nodes so we can go in. But I want you to stick with me, Aaron—understand? No running off—we do this together.”
“Yeah, yeah. Together. Got it.”
I hope you do, Isaac thought as he stared out the forward window at the derelict station. Down below in the planet’s atmosphere, lightning flashed silently, illuminating the tempest for a single instant before the lifeless world returned to darkness.
Oh man … so much awesome stuff to write! When the first three books are written, I’ll publish the first one, and publish the other two soon thereafter. I don’t want there to be a long gap between releases. But between book 3 and book 4, there will probably be a bit more time, since I intend to organize this series in groups of threes.
That’s just about it. Tomorrow, I’ll probably spend most of the day working on short stories, since there’s a story idea that’s screaming at me to be written. With short stories, you’ve got to move fast, because they will get away from you if you don’t write them immediately. But if I get a chance I’m probably going to start Comrades in Hope, because that’s the one I really want to be writing.
So many projects to juggle … I just hope I don’t drop them all!
