It’s been a little over three years since my first post on this website, and I thought it was long past time for an update. So here’s where this project stands as of October 2019.
I am well over 700 pages into Robot Dawn with the end nowhere in sight. Authorship can be an iterative process, and in the case of this novel, the story continues to build laterally as well as longitudinally. As you know if you have read my Novelsmithing and/or Story Alchemy, I always work from a basic plot outline that defines, if vaguely, all plot points up to and including the end of the story. The novel balloon may swell, but the basic shape remains the same.
Novels are in many ways a discovery for the author as well as the reader, and that has been particularly true with Robot Dawn. These authorial discoveries frequently necessitate returning to the beginning to update the narrative and the waterfall effect of the change as it propagates downstream. The discovery of the Argus at the Shackleton colony on the Moon is an example. The Argus was simply the result of another discovery, that of an astrology-like nature of the Helionet. I realize that this is ambiguous but necessarily so, and it has been an exciting revelation for me. Rarely does a discovery of this magnitude present itself this late in the writing of a novel. I’m still uncovering ramifications.
So there you have it. An ambiguous update for sure but a long overdue one. Hopefully the next will be not so long in coming and will have more to say about light at the end of the tunnel.
Hang loose. Be assured I’m making good progress.
