This prompt steps into the middle of an ongoing, never-ending debate among the writing community: Should you write to market or write what you’d want to read? I can only represent one of these perspectives, write what you’d want to read.
Over the years writing TAU CETI, I’ve had a short playlist of songs that I felt either captured a theme of the story or the mood of a particular scene.
Meet the crew of the experimental ship Santa Maria. It’s not a happy crew, but that’s OK, they may all die soon anyway…
TAU CETI is a big, complex story with a large cast of characters. This non-exhaustive list gives all of the important characters.
With thirty-eight chapters and a prologue, TAU CETI is an epic tale, with this final draft starting at 159,000 words.
TAU CETI has had two different prologues over the course of its existence. Neither are in the final edit of the book. This is the second prologue, told from Michelle’s perspective, a flash forward from very near the end of the story.
There have been two important people on my path to writing short fiction. I’ve talked about one of them, Janet Reid, many times. The other person, I don’t know as much about: Alex F. Fayle.
There’s four different ideas that I’ve picked up in writing courses, in interactions with other writers, and on the advice of a literary agent.
It’s hard to disagree with someone more successful than you. So maybe you need to figure out why you disagree.
TAU CETI opens about a decade after the end of the third world war. Many of the crew of the Santa Maria participated in that war: Jeffery Carter was a submarine, Michelle Patterson was a test pilot…
