Mark My Words

Aww…my baby turns 15 today.

Publishing No Time for Kings was the culmination of years’ worth of effort. I have roughly 1,000 printed pages from four other manuscripts shoved into cardboard boxes gathering dust, and enough rejection letters to wallpaper a small room. I don’t look at these early attempts as failures, though; they served as crucial stepping-stones while I honed my craft, refined my voice, learned the business.

Could I be better at the business part of “the business”? Well, yeah. Promotion has never been my strong suit–with the exception of this blog, but it’s not like I beat you guys over the head with “buy my book!” requests. My Fiction page is there, and if people find it, great.

Man, I suck at marketing!

But I’m not the only one. Ilsa Rey, fellow blogger/author, recently wrote, “Marketing and I are not best buds.” Like the movie Singles, that’s another thing we bonded over. I long ago made peace with the fact that I’ll probably never even recoup the publishing costs for No Time for Kings. The bestseller charts are overrated anyway!

(They’re not, but it’s a lie I tell myself.)

Bottom line: NTFK was a labor of love, a shot at immortality. Mission accomplished: it warms my heart knowing, long after I’m gone, some random Joe might stumble upon a dog-eared copy of my novel at a garage sale, pick it up, read the blurb, and decide it’s worth fifty cents. My name–and my words–will live on forever. For me, that’s what this is all about.

I wouldn’t turn down a big, fat royalty check, either. Just sayin’.

For a long time, I thought about writing a sequel, but I couldn’t really justify it. What is the point, I thought, when so few people have read the original? But eventually the urge to revisit those characters grew too strong to resist, so I began working on a follow-up called Earth Fights Back last year. Seventeen months later, and I’ve completed a whopping 30 pages, so I’ll never win a Prolific prize. Honestly, it’s not a high priority; I’ll continue to plug away at it when the mood strikes.

To commemorate the 15th anniversary of its predecessor, I’m sharing the first three chapters of Earth Fights Back here. One scene with Rachel, one with Alex, and one with a grown-up April. Feel free to read or download the .pdfs if you’d like, but there’s no obligation. Keep in mind these are unedited working drafts. I’d love to hear your feedback if you do.

Earth Fights Back Chapter 1
Earth Fights Back Chapter 2
Earth Fights Back Chapter 3

There’s another reason I’m not devoting a ton of time to EFB right now: a new suitor has come calling. And I have a fellow blogger to thank.

Erin, aka Esoterica, aka Existential Ergonomics–whatever you call her, at least she’s consistent with the Es!–is an amazingly talented writer whose honesty and lyrical prose are inspiring. Her blog touches on everything from health issues and legal battles to her IVF journey. She and her husband are dealing with a lot while living with his parents…Arizonans who hate to turn on the A/C. Despite these struggles, Erin writes with grace, thoughtfulness, and humor. I told her once she she should write a book.

Well, it turns out she has. Erin was doing a series of reader-submitted Q&A posts earlier this year, and back in May, someone asked, What is your debut novel?

If I had to claim a “debut,” she wrote, it’d be a story I started and never finished.

Erin once worked on a contract to find an engineer for an Arctic icebreaker, a ship built to cut through frozen waters and clear paths for other vessels, and fell down a rabbit hole reading about abrupt climate shifts like the Younger Dryas (kind of like Global Cooling on steroids). This gave her an idea for a story about a sudden-onset modern ice age in a world where all icebreaking ships have been decommissioned, except for one: the Endeavor. She describes it thusly:

It’s old, barely holding together, and already stuck in the Arctic with a small crew who slowly realize how wrong everyone was, while trying to survive in a world that changed faster than anyone expected.

I read that, and guys, I was WOWED. I thought the concept for The Endeavor was fantastic! Erin said the draft and research were long gone and she has no plans to return to the story. If someone else wants to take a swing at it, go for it, she wrote. It is exactly the kind of story I would want to read.

Me, too!

So, with Erin’s blessing, I am picking up the reins and taking a stab at writing it myself. Here’s my elevator pitch for a novel I’m calling The Last Icebreaker:

In a world plagued by climate change, global warming has made icebreakers obsolete. A sudden catastrophic atmospheric event causes global temperatures to plummet, leading to a flash freeze. At a remote scientific outpost in the Arctic, a group of climate archivists has been mapping the timeline of this new Ice Age; their data shows the freeze isn’t a temporary storm—it will last for 2,000 years. The information gathered during their research might save humankind, but they are trapped by the ice. Every icebreaking ship was decommissioned long ago, except one: the Endeavor. The government contacts the small crew piloting the ship across the North Atlantic; they are the only vessel physically capable of cutting a rescue path–but the ship is old and leaky, and tensions onboard are running high. Will the Endeavor be able to reach the scientific outpost in time to save mankind from certain extinction?

I may have changed the title, but the ship is still named Endeavor…and to pay tribute to the person who came up with this great idea in the first place, one of the main characters–a bright scientist–is named Erin.

She envisioned this as “a Ted Chiang type story, more about the ideas and implications than big action.” I wasn’t familiar with the name, but have since learned that Chiang’s science fiction novella, Story of Your Life, was adapted into the 2016 Oscar-nominated film Arrival, which I liked a lot. That gave me a pretty good idea of Erin’s proposed direction: more introspective than action-oriented.

I was initially leery of this approach, thinking I could never do it justice–I’m hardly the philosophical type, and this just screamed ACTION BOOK! to me–but the longer I considered it, the more intrigued I became. So, I asked myself, Why can’t it be both?

I believe it can.

So, I’m taking a classic hero’s journey plot and infusing it with quiet reflection and existential debate. The characters will think as much as they do. About moral responsibility, the delicate and contentious balancing act between man and nature, and the consequences of our actions. There will be action to propel the story forward and humanity to ground it. The Endeavor will function as a secondary character, and even the ice will behave like a living, breathing entity. There’s no true villain, no Hollywood ending, and no love story. This is not that kind of book…and it feels refreshing.

Man, am I jazzed!

So much so that, for the first time in my life, I’ve completed on outline. I knew exactly how the story ended before I even wrote a single word. What a novelty! I’ve always engaged in discovery writing (affectionately known as “pantsing” because you’re writing by the seat of your pants, letting the story compose itself, figuring out the plot, characterization, and ending as you go along). It’s a process that works well for Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, and Mark Twain, among others. And a huge part of No Time for Kings happened because I had no preconceived notions about the direction my story was headed.

But The Last Icebreaker feels different. More intricate and challenging, I daresay deeper, than anything I’ve written before. I consider it a gift from Erin, one that deserves respect. Plotting it out in advance instead of writing blindly for once in my life feels like the best way to honor that.

Thank you for letting me tackle this project, Erin. And happy anniversary, Rachel and Alex!

Is The Last Icebreaker a story you would want to read? If you’re an author, do you outline your work or rely on discovery writing?