The last time I posted, I talked a little about the novella I am currently working on, This Monstrous Heart. Today, I thought I’d say a bit more, partly just to share, partly to document my process for myself, and partly because I need to figure out a way to talk about it (I am terrible at back-of-book length blurbs and elevator pitches).

This novella has really developed out of a series of classes, which only reinforces my terrible weakness for being a student.

The initial idea for the story came from a class I took in May called “Writing Sci-Fi Like a Scientist” by Premee Mohamed. This was an online class offered by Clarion West. (They have a lot of online classes this fall, many with space still available. The classes, most a single session, are on the more expensive side (and more now than they were last spring). But I have taken a few and they have been of good quality with really interesting instructors.)

Anyway! This class, “Writing Sci-Fi Like a Scientist”, was particularly interesting and very practical. And Premee Mohamed is an amusing instructor. The exercise we did was brainstorming potential story ideas in small groups based on a scientific article.

This is the article I worked on: Uranium ‘snowflakes’ could set off thermonuclear explosions of dead stars

My initial ideas were:

• Perhaps the star is a danger to a nearby inhabited planet
• Or artificially blowing up stars using the same/similar mechanism
• Harvesting uranium snowflakes

So I thought about the article a lot and ended up fixating on the last idea, harvesting uranium snowflakes. And about a month later I had a rough idea of the story.

Once I had that idea, I knew that it was probably novella length in its scope.

I also had in mind a SF novella submission period coming up in October from Neon Hemlock, a small queer speculative fiction publisher.

Conveniently, a writer I have taken several classes from before, Kate Heartfield, was leading a “Write Your Novella” class through The Loft Literary from mid-June to mid-August. It seemed like a good accountability mechanism, as it was less a class and more a loose critique group. Students could post up to 2000 words a week (15 000 words total for the entire period) and Kate (and some other students) commented on them. (There were also weekly videos from Kate on different aspects of writing novellas that were very good.)

The comments were useful, but it was really the commitment I had made to myself to post the 2000 words a week that helped me get the first 15 000 words of the novella done.

My outline at the beginning was a bit vague about the ending and, as I wrote, I adjusted the outline to accommodate new ideas I had.

The first draft, which I finished in late August, ended up being around 23 000 words.

So I am now editing and it is going rather well. I did an initial edit of the full manuscript and made notes on larger issues I wanted to address (partly coming from the comments I received from Kate).

I have 4-5 weeks left to finish and I think it is going well (fingers crossed and all that).

The brief ‘elevator pitch’ description I wrote in early June still captures most of the story: 

With the star at the heart of the ancient Dyson sphere-like structure they live in no longer able to provide the energy they need, Terra thinks she has found a solution. But for her partner, Arolin, it is no solution at all. As Arolin and Terra struggle to identify a way forward, they discover they are both mistaken.

(It’s all mysterious about how they are mistaken.)

I need a better description than that for my own sake, but it will do for now.