I’ve been working on a big creative project: I finished writing my first novel!

It’s a standalone adult-audience space opera epic, and it runs about 180,000 words. That would amount to roughly 720 pages as a trade paperback, though of course there are variations in page size. The story follows a young scientist as she investigates a breakdown of the wormhole network left behind by a long-vanished ancient people and makes revolutionary discoveries about the nature of her galaxy, thrusting her into academic, political, and military conflicts. Of course, there’s everything you’d expect from a space opera — giant starships, court intrigue, space battles, romance, mysterious creatures, and even a detective sequence — but depicting scientists and scientific effort heroically was a big focus for me.

The book takes place in a distant galaxy I call the Cathedral Galaxy (more here and here), filled with nonhuman interstellar civilizations and ruins of the departed ancients. I first developed a map of this galaxy in about 2008 and wrote a few short stories over the following years — four of which ultimately became chapters in the novel.

I worked on an updated and improved version of the map as a personal project during the COVID-19 pandemic. I finished it in December 2020, but the creative feel of working with that map spurred me to keep going on a follow-on series of zoomed detail maps of major regions in the galaxy. As I worked, real-world events helped me crystallize a viable central conflict for an overarching Cathedral Galaxy epic. I finished the regional maps by January 2022. At that point I got myself a copy of Scrivener and started experimenting with its outlining features.

I didn’t think I’d be the kind of writer who meticulously planned out a story — I figured I would be the sort who had some characters and settings and wrote as exploration. But it turned out that I ended up plotting out every chapter and scene for the whole book, using Scrivener’s corkboard to track the three main point-of-view characters and drag scenes into the right order. By the time I was ready to write, I had a full set of template documents, each with a few notes about who was in them, where they took place, and what had to happen. This worked out well, as I found Scrivener really functioned as advertised: it helped break the big project into small, doable chunks. It helped me get into the mode of doing a little at a time, chipping away at the book until it was done, which happened in October 2023. (A few critical weeks of productivity took place dockside at a lake during the summer months!)

The hardest scenes to write were the ones I’d summarized as “this person talks to that person and learns this thing” or “so-and-so talks to whoever-it-is and gets a thing.” I found that my initial inclination to just start writing dialog and see how the characters interacted collided with the need to achieve whatever it was I’d plotted out. I sometimes ended up with people having an interesting conversation…that didn’t achieve what I needed. Or I’d rush into it: “Hello, Mr. Spoon Supplier, I need a spoon, please!” “–Sure, that’s my job.” It often took a lot longer for me to workshop all those pieces together than other scenes. Next time I do this, if there is a next time, I’m going to try and remember the “fractal method” for pivotal conversations: plot them out like mini-stories, with a beginning, middle, and end: suspense, tension, and resolution.

When I hit the halfway point, I gave it to a few family and friends. I wanted a check on the feel and style. The feedback I got was positive. I was on the right track! I could sustain this for another half! Once I finished, I sent it out again and gathered some comments. With the full story available, there were some aspects that didn’t work for some of the readers as well as they had in my head. (Funnily enough, they weren’t the plot threads I was worried about.) However, the feedback all pointed in roughly the same direction. Right away I had some ideas. I spent a few months revising, and finished that in July 2024. What I’ve received from the following round of feedback has told me that it will be the last round. Now I’m getting a few more outside opinions — and after I address any remaining comments, the next thing to tackle is querying agents.

I know I have a whole lot of rejection ahead of me, but I’m excited! I’m happy with what I’ve created, and I hope it goes somewhere. In the meantime…it will be nice to draw some maps again for my creative outlet.