How will it all end?
As usual I’m leaving it late to blog this month, possibly lulled into a false sense of security by managing to blog twice last month…
However we are getting to the crucial stage in the Lights in the sky series; the point when it all needs to pay off and the various hares I’ve set running needed to be hunted down…
The problem I face is that it’s all so complex…
There has been an ending to this series already (in the climax of the original trilogy, The Lost Colony), and I have to remain faithful to this but I can’t duplicate it. There needs to be a development of the narrative and development of the concept.
It is tempting to carry on regardless, just writing what comes into your head, and I often employ this approach, but this means that you miss out things (sometimes the bleedin’ obvious!), and so editing becomes important, add texture to the narrative, to correct mistakes and anachronisms, and to remain true to the overall concept.
And this necessitates lots of research…
So I’ve actually re-read the whole sextet this year, and because I can never just read the text, this had resulted in a complete re-edit of all six novels. I’m aided in this by a new feature helpfully introduced by Google, an enhanced spelling and grammar check (which I’m presuming is rather like Grammarly, but is free). This has proved invaluable and has pointed out lots of errors that my manual editing had managed to miss.
When you read bumpf from Agents and online luminaries offering advice (such as the ubiquitous Neil Gaiman), they always talk about the first and second edit (and presumably the third and the fourth…).
Well, I don’t work like that…
I don’t sit down one day and say to myself, ‘…today, I’m going to do the second edit of this or that novel’, my editing is constant. Every time I write a new section of whichever novel I’m working on, I review and edit the preceding chapters. Every time I re-read previous novels (and do this a lot!), I end up editing them.
I’ve nearly finished re-editing The leftover girl, and I rediscovered various speculations on the ethics of the Alpha Mission and the whole notion of maya, from the POV of Helen Choi, the architect of Mission AI, who at the end of her life now regrets the decisions she has made in her life, in the pursuit and what she now regards as false scientific gods, and now regards herself as being in error. In fact, she sees the whole notion of scientific progress (which underlies Western philosophy) as being ‘in error’ in religious terms (Helen is a Catholic), and an example of maya in philosophical terms, a concept she has imbibed from her late husband, Alex, who was a Buddhist in life.
This puts Helen in the same camp as Tata, albeit that they have reached this conclusion from completely different starting points (and by radically different routes).
This will inform the crucial last three chapters of the series, and currently the stakes are very high (getting higher), as I negotiate the last few miles in this epic adventure…
We’ll see how it all turns out…
The Author June 2019