Hey everyone!
I’m David. Formerly a mediocre podcaster, currently an engineer, and perhaps, one day, a published novelist.
I have a completed science fiction manuscript titled Spacewalker, and right now, I’m preparing to query agents. Every story starts somewhere, from the whisper of an idea to long nights and weekends writing and editing to, well, the end. A finished novel.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so here was my first step.
I couldn’t sleep. Not a wink, not at all. I lay in bed tossing and turning for hours. Maybe it was the cup of coffee I had at 4 PM. More likely, it was the storm of ideas swirling around inside my head. You can only have the thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool if—’ about a thousand times before it jeopardizes your sanity. I started taking notes on my phone, but that wasn’t enough. I needed more screen space. I got out of bed and opened Google Docs.
Wouldn’t it be cool if—
By no means an original combination of ideas on my part, that’s the back-of-the-napkin case for Atlantis (or many other mythical, ancient civilizations) made much more eloquently by folks like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson. But the implications of living in that world are what tickled my brain.
Getting those ideas out of my head was great for my sanity, but I still wasn’t tired. So, I figuratively put pen to paper, and this was what came out.
Earth was a little blue marble, nearly insignificant, except to the creatures that naively clung to it for life. That cosmic insignificance was impossible to understand from the surface. There, small problems loomed large. Food. Shelter. Sex. Subsistence. All critical to survival. All trivial to The Cosmos.
The suffering of a single creature was the smallest puff in a vacuum. The rise and fall of civilization was but a gasp. How could anything, anyone, grasp that from Earth’s surface, when surviving and thriving through each and every day consumed most creatures? When the small problems of today loom large, the large problems of the next day seem, at best, of equal importance. Immediate survival and comfort always trumped long term planning.
Stone and metal, older than any civilization, older than any geological sample, kindred atoms of the earliest bits of Earth herself, hurtled about the solar system. Orbiting elliptically, some stayed near the warmth of the sun; visible and predictable warnings of worse things to come, to those who watched the skies and wondered. But so many more stayed perched on the furthest edges of gravitational stability, haunting a graveyard of misshapen and aborted planetoids. Coldly and silently biding their time until a planetary alignment or passing celestial phenomenon upset the delicate gravitational balancing act.
These silent and frozen siblings, forsaken by the sun for eons, welcomed the gentle pull of gravity into warmer orbits, into reunions so long overdue with the little blue marble; the fair younger sister, so favored by the conditions necessary for carbon-based life, the rock so consumed by day-to-day frivolities that few still remembered to look at the stars and wonder. And worry. And prepare.
Wow was that something. Ambitious. Atmospheric. Maybe a bit creepy. Hard science fiction vibes.
You know what it wasn’t? Setting. Characters. Plot.
But it was a start. Step one on a journey filled with many missteps, stops, and restarts. In fact, none of these words survived into my first full draft.
I kept playing with this idea for the rest of the year, picking it up every few months and spitting out a few thousand words at a time. It was something, but it wasn’t consistent or particularly coherent. It wasn’t until a crystallizing moment in 2017 when I decided to really go for it.