Two changes. The first, is that I’m going to move my soft deadline for MAL. I think there’s 4K left in this book, and rather than making a sprint essential – maybe even two – I figure it’s better to just say July 11th is my new deadline. The second, is that TBS is not the next project anymore. It won’t have long to wait, but I’ve decided another main story needs the limelight. Actually, its needed it for a long, long time.
The Unreachable Star was the first book I ever wrote that I liked. First conceived in 2010, with elements that I can trace back to my childhood ideas, it’s the novel that the entire extended series came from. TUS was my first novel to ever submit, albeit as a naive young writer not recognising a lot of their own flaws. It’s the one I still see as the book I’m proudest of, and yet, I haven’t done any serious work on the story since 2017/18. In a way, as VOL was re-written entirely since the start of 1K, TUS is my only non-1K novel in The Service to Ore. And that makes me sad. It deserves better than that. Moreover, at 73K at its current revised length, it’s my shortest novel by 13,000 words. Length isn’t everything – heh – but this story has a lot more to give. It’s also got a lot more to cut, meaning I may have to write as much as 20,000 to 30,000 words to get it in shape. See where I’m going here?
So when I finish MAL, I’m gonna backtrack to TUS, do the 40 cards method, get it to where it should always have been, and then when I’m happy, I’ll move on. I have total faith I can make a great novel of that story yet. And, most important of all, this feels like what I should have done in the build up to 1K1K. Don’t get me wrong, I love MAL, and I think it’s easily my best work to date, but it’s not where I started. I want to get back to those roots now, and reflect in a more happy way on where I came from.
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