Sometimes, a story just won’t gel. Usually, that seems to indicate the story just isn’t ready. You need to do more research, or think on the story, or something.
I’ve been stuck in that spot for months, with several competing ideas swirling around my writer brain, but none of them ready to actually start writing. Some of the ideas were compelling, but I couldn’t seem to make an entire novel’s plot out of them.
I complained about this to my Viable Paradise classmates, and they reminded me of something Teresa Nielsen Hayden told us at VP17: If you have a few ideas that aren’t working out, try smushing two or more of them together.
Holy shit. It suddenly became clear that several of these ideas can actually coexist as part of an epic Space Opera.
In the aftermath of an attack in which his entire family was killed, Prince Shin Kincaid attempts to reclaim the throne he never thought he’d inherit–and finally grows up along the way. Disgraced soldier Alua Ten is trying to save Shin’s life and serve the Empire she once loved. A couple of infamous thieves are each trying to steal an important artifact before the other gets it–on a time limit, and while a corrupt cop is chasing them both. Several Interstellar Nations are being invaded by a seemingly invisible enemy that can turn their own people against them. And The Witness watches it all, as he searches for the alien race that made him immortal, so he can ask them to finally let him die after all these millennia of watching humanity make the same mistakes over and over again.
All of these stories are linked, in ways both big and small.
I’ve always wanted to write something on the scale of Peter Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy. If I can pull all these plot threads together in a way that makes sense, I will finally be able to make that happen.