The courage to go for it

I've been re-reading Becky Chambers' fabulous book The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet this week, and it's inspired me to radically change what I'm doing with my own work.

Becky's book was one of those that I fell in love with within minutes of starting reading.  It's a book I'm insanely jealous of, in a good way.  She has a unique concept in the story, and a truly original ensemble cast of characters, based aboard a starship. Each member of that crew comes alive as a unique and quirky individual.  This is a richly-detailed world where aliens are part of the crew and commonplace.

But the thing that really had me thinking about my own books was (spoiler alert) the love story of the comp tech and the AI.  It's poignant, touching, and above all absolutely convincing.   I had tried to build up a similar relationship in my book Snowbird, but I never felt convinced that it worked.  Beccy's book showed me that I was tackling it from the wrong angle.  I needed to just accept that this relationship existed, and stop trying to justify it.

So I've done something radical.  I've ditched Snowbird (which was supposed to be the first book in the series), and I'm starting with the second, Darius,  (I still can't find a better title for it after fifteen years).  And I did that after reading Becky's book.  What she does is plunge the reader headlong into her world.  Many SF stories try to do that, but so often I find that it doesn't work.  This does.  Having read the book twice, I still can't work out why she's named some things the way she has.  But it doesn't matter.  The story and the characters drag me along anyway.

So I've taken a lesson from her, and I'm re-writing Darius not as the second book in the series, but as the start of it.  I'm starting as Becky did, slap bang in the middle of the busy life of this chaotic orbital shipyard.  I'm trying to show the world as it unfolds around my characters.

And it's working.  I'm up to chapter seven now, and strangely I'm finding it easy to slip in the bits  of backstory from Snowbird that I need.  And I genuinely do need a great deal of information about events that happened in that abandoned book.  But the change feels right, and I have the sense of a novel bursting with possibilities.

Thank you, Becky Chambers, for showing me how it's done, and for providing me with a very valuable lesson.