I don't even know if I'm going to call this book Shipwreck Star anymore.
I may have totally lost control of what I am doing here.
I’m also aware that I’m right at the 30K wall, and historically what happens there is that I have to go back and restructure the first third of the book, but I don’t think I can do that this time because it feels like the structure is already what it has to be.
So… I am writing to you right now because I am avoiding the 245 words that would get me up to 33K and a third of a regulation novel (I have no idea how long this book is going to be but I wanted to be farther along by now but I also threw it out and started over twice) because I am trying to figure out how all of these moving pieces fit together.
As I was just saying on Bluesky (and now this is going to be a recursive loop, when I post the link to this newsletter there) what I’ve got my hands on is a book that I’m a bit intimidated by, because the influences on what I’m doing include Ursula Le Guin's THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, Mary Gentle's GOLDEN WITCHBREED, Nicola Griffith's AMMONITE, and Andre Norton's VOORLOPER. And that’s some intimidating DNA.
Anyway, as I said to Marissa Lingen, "I thought it would be clever to write a planetary romance that is also a romance romance and it turns out when you do that the romance romance drives the plot because planetary romances are just a lot of walking."
And this book doesn’t have an actual antagonist. It does have a lot of people with different goals who don’t get along very well and who are stuck working together, but they also have to be grownups because they are in a survival situation.
And they have a survival situation to navigate because of some deep-time TESCREAL legacy bullshit that is screwing things up for the entire planet.
Well, I have stated the problem. And the only way to solve it is to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
Once more into the Mines of Moria.