Shipmind Wrap-Up
By Terrana et al
And that’s it! It took several years, but we finally finished Shipmind.
This is the first novel we’ve ever written. Or, more accurately, it’s the first novel we’ve ever finished writing. I have no idea how many abandoned projects there have been along the way.
Weighing in at a little over 35 500 words, it’s pretty lightweight as novels go. I think the standard for a published sci fi novel is about three times that. We make no apology for this; it was as long as it needed to be to do what it needed to do. We actually had plans for another half again, which would have brought it up to 50k, but a couple of weeks ago we realized that if we tried to stick to that plan, we’d never get it finished.
The original plan was for four major story components: the inital waking up and survival; discovering who our protagonist really is and what they did; dealing with the fallout of those decisions back in the Commonwealth; and a shorter part about the return to Earth, meeting the Emperor, and trying to clear things up. In the end, we gave the first two the full treatment intended, condensed the third into the epilogue, and left the last completely undeveloped.
So, if the ending feels a little rushed, that’s why. It actually was. We just wanted to get this finished. Perhaps not the ending Erin and Ransom deserved, but it’s an ending of a sort. It also feels like the hook for a sequel, which again we’re not planning to do.
It’s very much of “first draft” quality. If we were going to publish (we are not) this is when editing would begin. We’ve decided not to do that.
Why? Well, we started writing Shipmind at a very interesting time in our lives. The writing was part of exploring that. A lot has changed, and it’s probably not something we’d write the way we did again. I know what we’re like. We’d end up trying to rewrite the whole thing and that’s just not a place I want to go.
Thanks for joining us on this three-year journey. There were long periods of nothing happening punctuated with bursts of intense writing. Turns out we probably have ADHD, which I’m sure surprises no one. But in the end, we wrote a novel. That’s amazing by any measure, I think.
If you’ve been waiting for us to finish before reading, now’s the time. Chapter 1 is here if you’d like to start at the beginning. The new chapters from today start at Chapter 29 and go all the way up to the end with Chapter 35 – Epilogue.
We hope you enjoy it, and we’re available via any of the usual channels if you want to talk about the story or what you think.