#d.g.swain

[alchemiasart]

Do over

I think the most powerful thing I ever learned to do was to let go of pieces of story that didn't fit.

For so many years (drafts, volumes), I felt like I was betraying the spirit of my story - especially if they occurred to me spontaneously - by editing the crucial bits. I periodically produced brilliant snippets of prose and dialogue and exchange, and if they didn't fit the actual framework of the story, I would often abandon the story altogether for fear of having to "kill off my beloved."

(This phrase, "killing your beloved", has never been about characters exclusively, it's been about the pieces of the story or script or scene that you adore but just don't belong.)

As I work on my July book (my challenge now updated to trying to put out a book a month for a year), a story that I started several years ago as the first of a hard science fiction series, I am absolutely chuffed that I have not suffered any bouts of crippling anxiety or table-flipping rage at having to change fundamental pieces of the plot.

Not to give too much away, but "Lost Ground" is about a generational space ark with a human colony that ends up decelerating too soon and will ultimately miss its destination completely. This coupled with a rash of missing biomass creates a double-whammy of disaster. The story is about solving both mysteries and finding an alternative for the colony.

Now, here's the behind-the-scenes part: I use a lot of filler names and roles when I'm still in the process of flushing a story out, but sometimes my writer-anchor doesn't really want to let me update those bits when it's time to make them more interesting. I bullied it into submission this time (pun intended), and came up with these excellent modifications:

Changed the suite of directors from a total sausage-fest to a legally mandated distributed gender range, including intersexed and nonbinary people. (I'd like to think that future is cast in progressive thinking.)

Altered the descriptions of moving around the ship to reflect what would actually happen: a ship that uses rotary acceleration to create artificial gravity is not going to have windows that show the stars moving away behind them; the spin of the Drum will spin the stars so that the same constellations occur again and again, changing very slowly over time.

I decided that I also needed some cultural representation and decided that the Director of Reclamation who's job it is to handle expired bodies should absolutely be a total Goth. What other culture would maintain the appreciation of the macabre and the respect for the rites of death better than they?

Instead of relying on exposition at weird places, I invented a manual that provides excerpts of policy so that there's context for the decisions that seem obvious to the characters but might seem a little weird to the reader.

The fun part about this is that it's just the first story out of at least six that I've penned so far, following the colony aboard the Zarathustra through their trials and tribulations. The cast is massive, though, so I expect that there will be a number of short stories and spin-offs even before I get to the actual sequels.

But, I couldn't do it at all if it weren't for suddenly being okay with a little literary euthanasia.