1,336,676 words. Ten years, and three days. Fourteen stories.
When I finished writing The Service to Ore in 2011, I thought I had finally put everything to rest. My life had entered an extreme turbulence from 2008 to 2011, and the only way I could make sense of it was to make it into a story. Instead, I attempted to take my own life, and failed just as badly at that as I had at trying to bring closure with the book. Would it surprise you, my imaginary reader, if I told you I was glad on both counts? The former was cathartic but painful, and was a story best not told so as to not hurt those I cared about. And I had more to give. But one bit of advice stuck with me.
“Why don’t you just change the names?”
In 2012, on September 17th, I started writing The Unreachable Star. None of the characters are direct one-to-ones of real people, with one coming close, but not to anyone that any person reading this has ever met. And no, I am not talking about Taft. That story idea wouldn’t come to me until later, until after I finished Unreachable, and realised that there was one change I wanted to make. Even when I rewrote the whole book from the ground up, I couldn’t make that change. It would take thirteen more books of set up to justify the change I wanted to make. And tonight, I made that change. On the 19th of September, 2022, I finished writing The Service to Ore. The good one.
And this time, this time I have closure. I’ll try and edit them as soon as I can, in case anyone else wants to go on this wild ride. I think you’ll find I got it right this time.
I’m putting this below that emotive post because it would be out of place not to, but Return to Monkey Island is fantastic. Oh, and fun fact: over 1.2 million of those words were in the last four years. Thank you 1K.
samshuttleworth.com 