Weekly Writing Intentions: July 16, 2022
Daily Diary, Day 684: As I hoped would happen when I wrote up my intentions last week, my novella Mrs. Stein Solves a Crime is now available in all the major retailers. The next step is marketing of the book, which meant announcing on FaceBook yesterday, sending out a newsletter today, and contacting BookBub to send out a notice to my followers. Depending how well sales go, I will look into if there are any other promotional sites I wish to use to get the word out.
I also spent the past week continuing to read other stories written in the shared world of the Paradisi Chronicles to get ready for the interview for the AlternateFutures podcast on Tuesday.
For those of you not familiar with the Paradisi Chronicles, in 2015, I joined a group of authors to create a near future world in which we could all write stories. This meant coming to agreement about the main narrative, which was that ten Founding Families--modeled on the Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos of our current world—would pour their money into finding a human-compatible planet to escape to (New Eden in the Paradisi Solar system) and developing the technology to get there. We decided that the wormhole process to get the Founders from our galaxy to the Andromeda Galaxy would create time-slips, backward and forwards and that the Founders would discover that New Eden was already inhabited by humans. These natives, called Ddaerans would have psychic abilities, as would some of the animals on the planet. We also agreed on timelines of technological discovery and exploration and created maps of New Eden, giving each Founding Family a region to rule over, laying out the basic governing system for the planet.
Once these basics were hammered out, off we all went, writing stories about the events leading up to the journey, the journey itself, and the first 200 years of settlement. To this date, there have been sixteen authors who have written stories as part of this shared world, and while the bulk have been short stories (twelve collected in an anthology) there have been a number of novels and novellas, written as well.
I choose to write about one branch of the Yu Founding Family from the journey to New Eden and through the first five generations of settlement in Caelestis (Caelestis trilogy). This meant that my own work intersected in some fashion with almost all the other stories that have been written. It has been these intersecting works that I have been trying to reread this past week to get ready for the podcast interview. However, I am finding this review useful as I begin to think about my next writing project, which is to pick up where Through Ddaera’s Touch, the third book in the Caelestis series, left off.
So, my writing intension for this week is to finish rereading the relevant other Paradisi Chronicles stories and begin to sketch out a basic outline for what I am simply calling my “Fourth Yu Story” for now.
And in my never-ending battle to balance work and the rest of my life, I am committed to making sure I walk every day. Below is my proof that I did walk today, one of the hardy roses that are still in bloom.