Mobius Progress August 2024

Hey, readers!

It's been a good few months for Mobius. I continue to meet with my writing group and write for about 8 hours a week. I'm currently working on chapter 14/40, putting me 1/3 of the way through with 40,000 words. This second draft is definitely stronger than the first draft, although I am starting to see there will have to be a third. Draft 1 to discover the story, draft 2 to get everything in the right place, and draft 3 to draw the readers in.

I recently reread Ender's Game, one of the first sci-fi novels I read as a kid, and I was astonished at how gripping it was. Ender's Game grabs you by the throat and drags you at light speed from the first page to the last. Not only that, but the themes and characters were prepared from the beginning and paced masterfully. No wonder it won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards! And I realized, I can take lessons from Ender's Game to keep my readers turning pages too.

Mobius continues to push the limits of my writing skills with every scene, from characters to worldbuilding to politics. It's a demanding growth rate, but writing is like studying or working out; the more experience you have, the faster you can improve. One new skill I'm enjoying is subtext. It's my experience that people think they understand their motivations much better than they really do. There's the story we tell each other, which I write in the text, and our true subconscious motivations, which come out in the subtext. I'm finding this to be an amazing tool for letting character conflict brew in the background until it's time for it to come out.

There's an idea in writing called the "muddy middle," the tendency for the middle of a book to be a slog to get through because the most interesting parts are the beginning and the end. With Mobius, the muddy part is closer to the beginning, chapters 5-12, which set up the stakes for the rest of the story. The middle, which I have just arrived at with chapter 14, is where things get exciting. It is where my first draft picked up and ran at full speed all the way to the end, so we're about to find out if the same thing will happen for draft 2!

I know my updates are coming less frequently. Part of the reason is because they were meant to keep me accountable. Knowing I had to give an update at the end of every month was a motivator to keep me progressing. Now, in my writing journey, I'm growing very fast, and the thought of a newsletter neither motivates me nor detracts from my motivation. I'll keep them up every few months to track my progress and share the new things I learn. Until next time!