And then the creative half of my brain said “screw it” and ran off on an idea that came from practically out of nowhere.<\/p>\n
In the movie, Robert Redford unkowingly insults an indian chief by giving him several captured scalps.\u00a0 The chief must\u00a0return with a gift of equal or greater value, and so gives Redford his daughter, who doesn’t speak a word of English.\u00a0 At first,\u00a0things are\u00a0hilariously awkward, but over time they grow into a beautiful and touching relationship.<\/p>\n Well, as I lay there thinking about the movie,\u00a0I wondered: what if the same basic storyline were set in space?\u00a0 Instead of a mountain man, the protagonist would be a space explorer \/ interstellar merchanter.\u00a0 Instead of an indian chief’s daughter, the female protagonist would be the daughter of a station master whose colony is facing severe famine and widespread starvation.\u00a0 When the merchanter boy unwittingly shows up at the doomed colony, the station master coerces him into taking his daughter to save her life.\u00a0 And so, for the next two months, the boy finds himself crammed into a tiny little ship with a girl who doesn’t speak his language.\u00a0 Hilarity ensues.<\/p>\n At first, I thought I’d keep it as a short story, but…yeah, that didn’t last long.\u00a0 The more I run with it, the more ideas keep coming to me–ideas that I haven’t played with in a couple of years.\u00a0 The story is set in the same universe as Gaia Nova and Bringing Stella Home,<\/em> but about a thousand years earlier, back when things were, shall we say, more primitive.\u00a0 I still don’t know where this story is going to take me, but I can tell it’s going to be a lot of fun.<\/p>\n The best part is that even if I expand this into a full length novel, the first part stands on its own so well that I could probably submit it to Writers of the Future.\u00a0 That never<\/em> happens!\u00a0 It’s been years since I submitted to the contest; I always wanted to send something, but all I could ever write was novels with long, complex beginnings that couldn’t be cut off at the 17,000 word mark.<\/p>\n Anyhow, the working title of the novel is Star Wanderer<\/em> (I can’t believe it’s not already taken), and it’s probably going to end up around 80k words or so.\u00a0 I only have a vague idea at this point, but it’s much more intimate and personal than epic in scope, so I don’t expect it to go much longer.\u00a0 I’ll probably finish the first part sometime next week and start looking for some first readers.\u00a0 I’d like to finish the rough draft before I start the Desert Stars<\/em> revision in October, but we’ll see whether that works out.<\/p>\n As for Edenfall, don’t worry, I’m still working on that project too.\u00a0 One of the advantages of writing longhand is that it’s much easier to pick up and just go; instead of having to stop and think about what needs\u00a0to happen next, the physical act of writing is slow enough that the ideas come much more organically.\u00a0 I might not finish it before October, but if I can juggle it with Star Wanderer,<\/em> I can probably juggle it with Desert Stars.<\/em>\u00a0 In any case, it’ll be good to work on new material and keep my writing sharp\u00a0while I’m doing the revision.\u00a0 We’ll see how it turns out.<\/p>\n So that’s what I’ve been up to in the last week.\u00a0 I only wish I were doing this full time, so that I could spend all day working on these stories.\u00a0 Soon, inshallah.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" They say the way you know you’re a writer is if you can’t not write.\u00a0 Well, last week I had the gratification of experiencing that again firsthand. For all of August, I was more or less betwen projects and not writing a lot of new material.\u00a0I’d just epublished Bringing Stella Home and was busy getting… Continue reading Just following my bliss<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[44,509,541,857],"tags":[192,1007,260,322,618,160,421,621,232,247],"class_list":["post-6008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ds","category-edenfall","category-sholpan-novella","category-sw","tag-discovery-writing","tag-gaia-nova","tag-movies","tag-novels-vs-short-stories","tag-pen-and-paper","tag-romance","tag-science-fiction-romance","tag-westerns","tag-why-we-write","tag-writers-of-the-future","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-1yU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6008"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6018,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6008\/revisions\/6018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/9\/97\/Jeremiah_Johnsonposter.jpg\")
<\/a>It all started when I was taking a power nap after a\u00a0long day at work.\u00a0 For some reason, my mind wandered to Jeremiah Johnson, an old Western with an awesome love story.<\/p>\n