For the longest time, I thought I only had it in me to write short stories. I love that medium so much. To this day, more than half of the science fiction I read are short stories published in magazines or anthologies and collections.
Primarily because of NaNoWriMo, I’d tried the novel thing. Several times. Each time, I started out with a cute, fun, interesting, potentially really cool nugget of an idea, and each time, it would fall flat about two-thirds of the way into 50,000 words and was ultimately non-salvageable.
If you’re familiar with the writer terms “plotter” and “pantser” (someone who outlines, often meticulously vs someone who writes by the seat of their pants), then you should know I am a recovering pantser.
The year was… 2012 (omg… that long ago???) and I decided that pantsing wasn’t getting me to a completed novel, so I would attempt this planning and plotting thing. I didn’t tilt the scale fully in that direction, so I became a “plantser” (someone who mixes the best elements of plotting and writing by the seat of their pants) and started planning that year’s NaNoWriMo novel. It was going to be called “How to Be a Rocket Scientist” and the protagonist was Ethan, a 17-year-old wunderkind space pilot who happily lived and worked on a space station in the asteroid belt and whose life got really interesting when he fell for a girl, Stella, and the two of them get kidnapped by a race of alien robots.
There were a lot of “darlings” in this novel. A lot. In writing, a “darling,” is anything that a writer is most proud of, or most in love with in their own writing. It could be anything from a character to a particular sentence or phrase, from a plot point to an entire chapter.
The title was my initial darling, the first thing I loved about the novel. But as I wrote, I began to develop a queasy feeling about it. I came up with the title because I imagined this kid, Ethan, this space-piloting wunderkind, snarkily listing things others needed to know to be a pilot themselves. Ethan knew it wasn’t easy, he knew he was special, and he knew he was better than kids on Earth who took short vacations out to his space station, his home, who thought they were all hot-shot, but didn’t know how to pilot a little ship like he could. Ethan was a pilot, not a rocket scientist the way we think of it today, and that’s what made me think I wasn’t doing the title justice. But I hoped that because Ethan knew he wasn’t really a “rocket scientist” but a space pilot, that it would come through in his snark. I also planned to come up with an actual list of 10 things that Ethan would have referred to several times in the book. It was going to be the best book ever.
Not only wasn’t it the best, it wasn’t great. It wasn’t even all that good. I didn’t have 10 things that worked in this scenario. It was also clear that I was cliché-ing it all up with Ethan falling instantly for Stella. Stella, for her part, was brilliant and beautiful. Brilliant with computers. I initially had her, oh-so-cliché-falling for Ethan eventually, but she really didn’t want to. To her, Ethan remained an immature kid throughout the entire book. So “How to Be a Rocket Scientist” sat on my hard drive, in the nested file system that is my personal graveyard of unfinished works. Abandon hope anyone but me who tries to sift through that mess.
About two years ago, I knew I needed to finish a longer work. I wanted to finish something. For realz. I resurrected “How to Be a Rocket Scientist.” Why this and not others? I had some other darlings in there that were calling to me. Not Ethan, not Stella… but the robots. The story of these robots needed to be told.
So I bravely opened up the abandoned file and started messing with it. I started making changes. And more changes.
“How to Be a Rocket Scientist” turned into “Ethan’s Robot Planet.” I spent some time thinking deeply about the pacing of a novel, the story beats and such. I listened to and read a lot of James Scott Bell and his signposts. I spent a great deal of time studying the Better Novel Project and how Christine Frazier deconstructed several popular novels. (Better Novel Project seems to have gone dark… her Pinterest and Twitter accounts still exist, but there have been no new posts since 2018 and the website, betternovelproject.com no longer exists, which is a shame, because there was a TON of great content there. I hope she’s okay. I would still check out her Pinterest board. There are several info graphics there that capture many of her key insights.)
I dropped the cliché of 17-yr old raging hormone kid chasing after girl and eventually dropped Ethan. Stella became the protagonist, and Stella then became Ruby. Somewhere around this time, instead of a full length 100k word novel, I developed a plan for a series of 4 novellas, roughly 40k words each. Also around this time, I learned to love Scrivener. Until now, I had been content with writing in Word or Google docs. For short stores, this still works for me. But for anything longer, I need to see my scene cards and outline alongside the text. I am probably not fully using all the features in Scrivener, but it’s working well for me.
“Ethan’s Robot Planet,” became “Ruby’s Robot Planet.” The first novella also had a subtitle: “Robots, Robots Everywhere.”
As I continued to edit, more darlings were killed. Or, potentially postponed to a later novella in the series (I’m hoping to bring back Bernard. He’s a sweet older man who watches the sky… but if we see him at all, it won’t be until the still unnamed third novella in the series.)
I aged Ruby. Instead of 17, at the start of this novella, she’s 19. An adult, but not quite in that futuristic society. I aged her to help drive home the fact that this isn’t intended to be a YA novel. It is easily accessible to the YA audience, since there are no adult themes in it, but my primary audience are the same adults who have fun reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and other humorous sci-fi.
Next, while the robots persisted, they transformed. Mostly because every time I had a thought, it included some detail I needed to add in to continue world-building the robots. My goal is that readers will find them very interesting, and fun – not just for this one novella, but the entire series.
Finally, the title became what it is now and will forever be: “Crazy Foolish Robots” (with no subtitle).
A lot of darlings were killed in the making of this work. I hope you, my wonderful readers, will enjoy the final product and will anxiously look forward to novella #2, which I’m working on finishing the first draft of right now. I’m taking the former subtitle of #1 for this one. It will be called: “Robots, Robots Everywhere.”
I still love parts of my original concept for “How to Be a Rocket Scientist” and one enjoyable thing about being a writer is that I can continue to tweak and change concepts and components and reuse material another day. I still want to write that list, but maybe not for a future someone living on a space station but maybe for someone today. Hmm… can anyone say ‘stay tuned for my next blog post’? I think I have an idea for that…
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