Stargazer

So I’ve officially decided I’m gonna put Wayfinder up on the shelf and work on Stargazer for a little while. I just need to back away from it, I think. I’ve been so close to it that I’m having trouble pinpointing what’s not working. And even if I could, I’d almost certainly be too stubborn to make a drastic change right now.

I made a lot of leaps with Wayfinder and I think Stargazer, even if it’s still in infancy, is a little more manageable for me at the moment. Making it ownvoices and with the MC more like me than just the color of my skin, bringing myself even closer to the work, I think I’ll be more capable of catching flaws early. This will be a continuation of the Wayfinder story but I think I want Wayfinder to be the prequel rather than have Stargazer be the sequel if that makes sense.

If I’m really trying to follow the model of Octavia Butler’s Patternist series, then I think this is how I need to start. Restart, really. I need to do some more research. I need to find a critique partner for two. I need to do a lot of things. But giving up ain’t one of them.

RevPit really opened my eyes. The 10Queries feed was super beneficial, even the ones that clearly didn’t belong to me. It’s one thing to have friends and family praise your work, but to have complete strangers and professionals say there’s still work to be done… It’s not that I’m discouraged really. It’s just that I’ve finally had some people tell me there are some larger issues here. Hell, I had suspected there were some bigger problems but no one had confirmed those suspicions up until recently. And while I work on something else, I’m going to try to find people who can help me identify these issues more directly so that when I do come back to Wayfinder, I’ll be capable of working on it again in earnest.