All the Bitter Stars

Currently, the focus is on Selonge Naita, a character who writes her own story in first-person.  But unlike many first-person narratives in science fiction, Selonge's story is a past-tense reflection on her past, which creates unique challenges in the writing.  She's looking back as she writes, so she already knows what's gonna happen - you'll get snippets of that as we go, places where she admits "I didn't know it then, but..."  As a writer, though, I have to withhold some key pieces of information to maintain the tension in the story.  And this makes things interesting.  Especially since Selonge uses some rather "colorful" language when she talks.  (Warning: f-word approaching!)

Writing the opening chapter to a novel is one of the hardest things for me.  So far, I've written maybe a dozen opening chapters for the first novel in my series, A Daughter of a Lesser Star -- and none of these are interchangeable.  Each one implies a different direction for the story -- each one would require new middle chapters to be written in order to carry the promise of those opening pages. However, I think I'm on the right track.  In the current opening chapter, the focus is on Selonge, Peg, and how Selonge writes about "the war."  In this book, it's not just about Selonge going on adventures - it's about how she narrates her own development as a human being. Hopefully, I'll have this opening chapter ready to share soon.  It needs quite a bit of revision right now, but it's getting there.  In the meantime, I also have several hundred pages of middle  chapters to edit.  And then an ending to write, too.  Plus more frame story to a...