Mobius Draft 1: Finished! - December 2023

Greetings, readers, from the 21st century! November has been a fantastic month for Mobius, because I finished the first draft! That’s right, the story exists, beginning to end! It is 40 chapters plus an epilogue, sitting at 88,000 words, the longest story I have written to date.

Writing “The End” after the final chapter creates a phase shift in an author’s mind, like ice turning into water. I have been writing some version of Mobius since I was 14, scrapping and re-plotting it over and over again. And now, it’s written. It exists. And my relationship with the story has ascended to a new plane of being.

If any of you are thinking, Great, the book is done, when can I read it? The answer is, not for a while. This is just the first draft, and cleaning it up will take at least another year, not to mention finding an agent and a publishing deal. When I began, my outline was incomplete and I didn’t really know what the main point of the book was. I struggled in the early chapters, knowing I needed to set up the characters and themes, but not really knowing what for. That changed when I wrote the middle and end. Now that I have a strong grasp on the themes, I can use those early chapters to mold each of the characters to reflect those themes from their unique angles.

During December, I’ll be preparing for draft 2, analyzing the plot, structure, characters, and other dimensions of the first draft, and writing a new outline. Come January, I’ll dive into the second draft. The plan: to revise 3-4 chapters a month and finish by December 2024.

Mobius is a story about waking up to a universe much vaster and stranger than we knew. It has a flavor of fantasy, making use of technologies that break the laws of physics as we know them, but are treated as consistently as hard sci-fi. It is a speculative exploration of possible future societies, contrasting a flawed utopia with a functional dystopia. It’s a political mystery and a coming of age adventure, with a sprinkling of cosmic horror.

Looking at what I’ve done, I feel satisfied and hopeful that, with my background in physics, studies into narrative craft, decade and a half of practice writing, and reading library of bestselling science fiction novels, I have something with Mobius worth contributing to the sci-fi literature community. I am incredibly excited to continue working on this story and eventually share it with the world!