Every time I finish a piece of fiction I feel like I’ve finished a new, bizarre struggle. Taking an abstract idea and putting a series of events and recognizable characters on top of it is difficult every time but trying to incorporate new ideas and lessons learned from previous work puts a new spin on it every time. When I sat down to write the Sidereal Saga I hoped to put together a short, fast moving story told in a series of vignettes that I could move in and out of freely.

What resulted was something quite different.

The Sidereal Saga is the longest single project I’ve written, so right away I fell short of a central goal. Furthermore, in the course of writing I discovered I had a harder time multitasking between it and other projects. Perhaps this was a side effect of the space opera genre. Up until this point I have never tried to write something with such a large cast of characters spread across so many venues with so many variables to keep track of. The complexities of the story made pivoting away from it much harder.

While that complication is intuitive, it did make structuring Lloyd’s story as a series of vignettes with other stories scattered through it much more difficult as I could not find the time to set aside for writing them. So I ultimately failed in that goal as well. When taken as a whole the lesson learned was a significant one – don’t bite of more than you can chew. I always knew space opera was a complicated and difficult genre. Seeking to write one while juggling other projects was a wildly optimistic goal and one which was clearly out of my reach.

With all that said, I feel I did fairly well in writing the story itself and that is always an important threshold to reach when working on any project. While I had some ideas for character beats and payoffs that did not quite come to pass as I had a solid outline that is only slightly different from what ultimately came together. (At some point I will do a post summarizing my outline and the resulting story. I’ve done this before but I think the result this time is passive p particularly interesting.) So I also feel like much of my prep work paid off well.

As per my usual structure, I will be taking some time to publish some essays on the state of writing, my own and others, before jumping into my next project. There will not be a many this time around,  I think. Less to say that I haven’t already and I am very eager to get started on the next thing. There may also be a special Halloween story this year. We will see.

However, first and foremost there will be a short break. As is usual, now that I have finished a story I will take a week off. I am so grateful to ask those who tube in on a regular basis. You can’t imagine how encouraging it is to see another name sign up for updates of how many visits on Saturdays to read the new chapter. Thank you so much, and I will see you in two weeks!