M.J. Whitehead

Writing in the skeleton of Dreamspace continues apace. Some of it is very bare, and there are scenes where I know the prose is off, or the scene isn’t really doing enough yet, or it’s dialogue-driven instead of action-driven, but I’m reassured that I can see all the problems. For now, I can simply say to myself that this is what rewriting is for.

This is fine though, it gives me something to flex the revision muscles. Currently the document is sitting at about 35,000 words, not counting the appendices that are probably more for my own reference at the moment. The plot is beginning to take shape, (those 35,000 words are stretched through a lot of scenes, and include some of the outlining in areas where I haven’t written enough to establish what’s going on) and it looks like it will be readable at the very least, which is exciting. It still very clearly needs test reading sometime to see if it resonates with my potential audience, and I need to resolve whether any of the scenes near the beginning make a strong enough opener. Right now I open by establishing the narrator and setting up some things for the series because it’s just sorted into chronological order.

Otherwise, I’ve been brainstorming a series of short stories in a universe I’m referring to mentally as Ouroboros. As the nickname suggests, it involves time travel- more specifically, it’s about a time-travel war between a distopian world government and a bunch of rebellious historians and scientists who invent time travel. So I have some plans to write about historians playing at being secret agents, mock Back to the Future while explaining that time travel paradoxes don’t really exist, and so on. I think hopefully the geeks-as-spies in a civil war thing should keep the time travel fresh for this universe, and I’m hoping I can use it for some cool short stories.