APHELION | 遠日點

The interplanetary war is about to start, and the planet of Es has a secret--a superweapon who could tip the war in their favour. Only problem: the weapon is a thirteen-year-old boy named Rian Scott who refuses to cooperate.

But he isn’t the only one who wants nothing to do with the war. There’s also Shelby, a smugger working hard for a ticket off the planet before the war starts. When Shelby is hired to break Rian out of the facility he is kept in, they soon find themselves with only each other to rely on, caught in the fight to capture the world’s most powerful weapon before anyone else does.

WHUH. Hello. I spent a while being very lost on how to proceed with this story, and after numerous attempts at an outline and leaving a million notes on my document, I think I'm finally getting somewhere.

Rian's motivation, especially, was what kept tripping me up. He kept flip flopping between motivations, and for a long time I was just resigned to it because I didn't know how else the plot would work if I picked one way or the other. But eventually I realized IF I changed out the antagonists for one of the scenes, then I could just fix this whole problem. The solution is so simple in hindsight, but when you're lost in the sauce (the writing sludge™), even simple solutions seem impossible.

For a while I seriously considered cutting Rian's POV out completely, and having the whole story (or at least the beginning of it) be only seen from Shelby's perspective. My reasoning was that this would 1) make Rian's superpower reveal more ~shocking~ and 2) allow me to skip over the whole problem of Rian's flipflopping motivations. I think this COULD have worked, if the story was focused on Shelby's story, but I did really want Rian's backstory with Holly and Marl and Dr. Scott in there too. I don't think he would be as compelling a character if we didn't get his side of the story too.

Anyhoo! After all that, I still had some trouble psyching myself up to actually do any meaningful writing. I kept wondering why writing Suddence felt so easy, but writing this felt like a slog.

But then I remembered writing Suddence DID feel like a slog at first. And what changed that was convincing myself I could buy myself a fancy reward if I hit a set deadline. For Suddence, I told myself I could buy Lego if I finished the draft by May 17th. And now, for Aphelion, I'm telling myself I can buy myself a nice thing if I finish the draft by the end of October.

As usual, "finish" doesn't necessarily mean "good." It just has to be done and have a whole plot, even if the connective tissue is all string cheese. It doesn't matter. There just needs to be a foundation. A roughly cut block of wood before I start working in the details.

(I haven't decided what my reward is yet.)

So now, I have finished writing Act 1 of the story, covering Shelby's attempt to break Rian out of jail. It has a loose three-act mini structure. The word count is at 46,329.

Excerpt! Transcript under the cut.

Hi. So, as per the last update, these posts are gonna be a bit different now. Instead of updating every time a chapter is finished editing, I'm updating whenever I feel like I've made meaningful progress on it. I know, that's quite subjective, but given that I'm basically back to an exploratory phase for this wip, it'll be a little hard to only update whenever I "finish" a chapter (the break between these updates would also be, like, months).

The biggest thing I'm struggling with is that I keep finding myself being too attached to the original version of the story (the version with Cay) to try new things. When I get stuck, I just convince myself I have to power through it and it'll eventually work out. Uh, news flash, Emily. When you remove a whole main character from a story, the whole story has to change. Yes, even the scenes that don't actually involve said character.

It's just. I didn't expect it to change so much. The pacing is completely thrown off. Characters have more room to develop. And that means character motivations might change. Those are all things I'll have to do heavy fixing on in the next draft. For now, I've just written up an outline detailing these changes.

Hi. So. These updates are going to be a little bit different now. Originally I wanted this current draft to be a polish pass, but after making many changes to the wip, I realized this is going to be another regular draft, with the focus on knocking the story into place rather than finetuning edits. If I'm going to finish this draft in a meaningful amount of time, I can't be contemplating over minute wording and pretty prose. The goal now is to just get this new version of the story done.

So what does that mean, exactly? Honestly, I'm not sure. I just know I'm changing my attitude on this draft and not letting myself get caught up in the details of it all.

Anyway, onto the story and what I wrote! We're officially in Part 2 of the story now. Chapters 10, 11, and 12 cover a spicy jailbreak (spicy as in it's action packed, not that it's sexy) and Bee and Rian finally meeting! Woo-hoo! The fun thing to play with here is that Bee has no idea about Rian's superpowers. She's just like "why. is this child in prison."

There's some connective tissue missing in there, but I'm not gonna let myself worry about that right now. There are a looooooot of things I'll need to edit in Part 1, lots of exposition that are handled really clumsily, but I'm just going to make notes for myself and tackle them way later. This was the process I had with Suddence, and that worked pretty well for it. There are just certain things you won't know how to properly edit and execute unless you actually have a whole (if messy) story to work with.

Currently the word count is at 42364! I'm letting myself write shittily from now on, so the excerpts won't be as pretty. Still, I think it's fun to share them, and it's always fun for me to look back on these documenting posts and see what changed.

(Photo description in alt!)

Haaaaaappy August! I finished editing Act 1 of APHELION, woohoo!

This chapter is 4940 words long, bring the total count to 37575. 

The previous draft at this point was 47218 words long, for comparison.

In the previous draft, I actually got up to one chapter past Act 1. Instead of pushing ahead though, I’m going to go back to Suddence and edit that up and have that all prepped for critiquing. Exciting! 

Ramblings about the ~journey~ so far below the cut!

Oh, oh! In my rush to catch up to my previous draft, I totally forgot to update on chapter 8. Here’s Shelby dropping the first (and only?) F-bomb in the book :^]

Ch-ch-ch-chapter nine! I’m just one chapter away from catching up to the previous draft!

This chapter is 3031 words long, bring the total count up to 32638.

Chapter 7 is a brand new chapter! Never existed before! Despite how important it is to the worldbuilding!

The “she” in question here is Ruyna Candour, a woman from years and years ago colloquially called “planet killer.” You see, she has the power to do exactly that, and she has actually done exactly that. Whoever had her would win the war. But she died in a missile strike.

With another interplanetary war ongoing, you can see why Rian is so coveted, and why his existence has to be kept secret: whoever has him will win the war. But also, nobody likes the idea of there being another planet killer. As Shelby puts it in another chapter, what a terrifying thought.

So nobody knows about Rian except the Essan government. They secretly train him for the war, but Rian isn’t as strong as Ruyna, and they are getting impatient.

Anyway! The document is up to 26304 words now, with this chapter being 3084 words long. I’m slowly creeping up to where I left off in the previous draft :^D

If it seems like I’m doing a lot of work today: well, yes, kind of, but for this chapter it’s just light editing in continuity with the new story.

This chapter also got split in half. I needed to fit another Rian chapter in, and oop! Would you look at that! This chapter has a break in the middle with a significant timeskip, perfect for slipping in a new chapter seamlessly.

Fun fact: “Tria Volkova” is a reference to one of the super early drafts of Aphelion, when it was still called “Happy Endings” and was some kind of spy thriller more than it was a sci-fi thing. Bee didn’t exist in this draft, but there was a girl named Tria Volkov with strawberry blonde hair who was Cay’s (then known as “Chris”) partner and supposed love interest.

Coming up on 20k words now! This chapter is a short one, surprisingly, at only 1630 words, when all the other chapters are around 5k. 

It’s mostly new stuff, exploring a bit more of how Rian feels about being recaptured (he feels. well. bad, of course.), including more interactions with the people around him, such as his bodyguard Marl, his caretaker Holly, and new doctor Dr. Latham. The through line is that they are all nice to him, but the niceness means nothing when they’re all still complicit in what is basically his imprisonment. Rian feels so alone, man!

The next Rian chapter will explore more of his powers: how it works, and how it compares to the only known previous case of someone with his powers. This will also be new stuff that didn’t exist in the previous draft, which is quite wild to think about given that it’s so important. It seems like removing Cay was the right call after all!

I’ve also been brainstorming / daydreaming about the new trajectory and ending of the story. I have a few thing cemented down that I’m quite satisfied with, so that’s exciting too.

C’est tout! For now, onto Bee’s chapter.

Another chapter edited! A lot of convoluted worldbuilding stuff was removed, and some narration was simplified. This whole bit is new; originally the ham was something that Cay and Ev found, but now that they’re both deleted from the story, it’s going to Bee and Idan. I think it’s more fun and also makes more sense.

I feel like every excerpt I share from Rian’s chapters are like, dark and gruelling, so here’s a bit from his flashback instead.

Onto Chapter 4! Total word count of this new version is ~11k.

With the new version of APHELION in mind, I re-edited the first chapter! I changed some wording, and some actions from the two incidental characters Thomas and Maira. 

In the original version, they hold Rian at gunpoint out of suspicion, but I found that to be a little out of left field, given that Rian is a) a CHILD b) obviously injured. The original idea was that there was a heavily infectious disease that caused similar symptoms (coughing blood, nosebleeds, etc) and that was why Thomas and Maira were so wary of Rian, but the disease aspect was removed from the story loooooong ago, so I don’t know why I still kept Thomas and Maira’s hostility. Anyway, they’re much nicer now. Which is all the sadder.

I find it helps with editing to put the document on “read mode” and making it have book dimensions! It makes you read what you wrote in a different context, and it certainly helps me figure out if certain lines would work in a book or not. Incidentally, that’s why I’ve been sharing my excerpts a little differently, in screenshots of said “read mode” instead of copy-pasting the text itself. It just looks so much more legit, man.

For accessibility, I’ve put the transcript under the cut!

So. Uh. It hath certainly been a while since I properly updated on Aphelion. It has also been no secret that I’ve been struggling with this wip. 

In short, I created this wip when I was a teenager and full of angst, and although I did pare down the angst in the story a lot as I grew (both physically and as a writer), there were just certain aspects ingrained into the story that were still just Too Much, and I really wasn’t liking where the story was going. And THAT meant I wasn’t having fun writing the book, which truly was the worst feeling.

So...what now? I don’t want to abandon this story! There’s still a lot I like about it, and I really want to share it with everyone! But I really needed to figure out how to fix this story, or else I’d just find myself trapped in the same hamster wheel, tumbling around in the same story issues no matter how much I tried to rearrange them.

FIRST: To identify the problem. This is something I’ve been aware of for years, and it’s that Cay’s story is much too dark and gritty. That could be fine, but...the type of stuff he goes through is giving T/he Fo/xhole C/ourt, which is a series that I did like a lot for a time, but that I’ve also come to be critical of for its...how do you put it...trauma porn? I think that’s the word. And I don’t want my story to be that, even if it is popular.

But here’s the thing: I’ve tried paring down how dark Cay’s story is. I’ve tried having the bad stuff happen off screen, or be implied instead of said. NONE of it was working. And it doesn’t get better in the planned sequels, where he basically spends all his time consumed by guilt and grief. His whole story was huge bummer to think about, let alone write. He also just adds so much complexity to the story, which could be a fine, normal thing, because twists and turns are fun, OR it could just make the story more muddy and convoluted. And I’ve been finding it’s the latter.

And, leading into the next point...

SECOND: Prioritize. What exactly is it about this story that I like? I like Rian’s story, which is an exploration of the “kid with superpowers used as a weapon” trope that I like a lot, and I like Shelby, who I’ve always liked writing because of how dry and snipey she can be. I like the odd relationship between her and Rian.

And Cay...well, I like Cay, and I like how I made his story intertwine with the rest of the plot, but he was, UNDOUBTEDLY, the one dragging everything down. It’s always his chapters that feel too convoluted, too convenient, too contrived.

And so, THIRD, the diagnosis:

I’m cutting Cay entirely out of the story.

And that’s. WILD. to think about. He was the bona fide main character. He was the character I drew the most and thought most about. There was a plot twist (several, in fact) involving him later in the story that I’ve always been excited to see readers’ reactions on, but I had to weigh my options: do I want a story that works, or do I want a reaction from readers?

I want a story that works.

So. Right now, I’m trying out a new version of the story WITHOUT CAY. That’s right. He’s gone from the story. And what I found out is that when I do this, I actually open up a lot more room for properly placed (AND paced) exposition and worldbuilding. Parts of the story are allowed to breathe. It allows the story to be more focused on the theme and character relationships.

This means that, yes, I’ll be killing so many darlings. There are still parts from Cay’s story that I really love, but if I can’t kill these darlings, then the story isn’t going to go anywhere.

Other things that will be cut are: the “magic” system (it never added anything to the plot. This is also a problem I’ve been aware of, but I never cut it because I just thought the concept was cool.); Ev and Jack; aepids (the pterosaurs they ride on).

That being said, I do plan to reuse some of these in another story that I’ve also been stuck on, sooooo we’ll see how that goes.

I’ve gotten one chapter done so far; basically I’ve repurposed parts of Cay’s chapter and turned it into Bee’s chapter. I struggled a little with it (this chapter/setting ALWAYS makes me struggle) but I managed 3k words for it!

That was a long update, so here is an excerpt or Bee and Idan scavenging.

Word Count

> Chapter 7: 4632

> Total: 41464

Whale whale whale. The last time I updated was in June 2022. It’s basically been a whole year. What happened? I’m glad you asked!

First: I was just getting kinda tired or and burnt out by this story. It’s quite large and there’s quite a bit of intricate worldbuilding and backstories that weave through the narrative, so it uses up a Lot of my problem-solving brainpower. I got stuck in chapters 6 and 7 and couldn’t get unstuck, so I decided it was time to take a break from APHELION.

Second: But that doesn’t mean I stopped writing! I moved onto my backup wip, SUDDENCE, which is much smaller in scale and much shorter. I thought of it as my breath of fresh air, and I reasoned that if I managed to finish a draft of it, it would make me realize that i CAN write a whole story, and I would get a new surge of motivation and confidence for APHELION.

And what do ya know! I finished draft 2 of SUDDENCE last week! It clocks in at 49k words (which is more than what APHELION has so far, which is. wild) and it taught me a valuable lesson: KEEP IT SUPER SIMPLE. My problem with APHELION was that it was much, much, much too complicated for no good reason, and I had to learn how to pare things back.

That’s something I kinda knew for a while, but working on SUDDENCE really just drove it home, and it gave me practice for how to simplify things.

What’s Different?

So anyway! I know I skipped Chapter 6 (oops) but I finished Chapter 7, which is Rian’s chapter. In this one, he struggles with the idea of running away and having his own life vs. staying and helping ~save the world~. “Saving the world sounds pretty noble, why would he run from that?” BECAUSE you see the people he works with (or rather, for) may not have entirely noble intentions and helping them might end up (and did) hurt people. And Rian doesn’t want that on his conscience! But if he runs away, he loses his avenue to do good to the world because he’s just a 13-year-old kid. He doesn’t have the resources and know-how to run around and perform miracles. Plus, he hates being on his own. This kid’s got a lot going on.

Changed:

The entire second half of the chapter was changed. Originally Rian is asked to perform an interrogation with his superpowers, and it goes on for a while, and it leads to this whole thing of him accidentally implicating Cay etc etc ANYWAY that was the part that was definitely too complicated for no reason, so now Rian just pretends he has a headache and manages to get out of doing it. The whole thing about Cay was just taken out entirely (it was too plot-conveniency anyway).

I also rearranged the general order of events. Can’t go too much into it because #spoilers.

Excerpt! Here’s Rian and Holly, AKA his only friend in the world.

Holly sighed through her nose and brushed the hair out of his eyes. “I’m sorry, Ri. I know you don’t feel well. Eat as much as you can, alright? I can help you eat the rest.” She tugged at one of his curls, frowning slightly. “And then we can do something about this hair—”

“I don’t want to cut it.” The words came out stuck together like jam. He felt awful for talking back, and he didn’t know why. Just yesterday he had threatened to shoot her. Why did this feel like crossing a line?

“You don’t want to cut it?” Holly tucked the lock of hair behind his ear. “What about just a little trim? So we can get this”—she drew her finger across his brow, sweeping the hair once more out of his eyes— “out of the way? Would that be alright?”

Rian didn’t see a point in arguing, so he nodded.

Holly smiled. “Okay, then. Now eat your breakfast. It’s good, I promise.”

His breakfast is pancakes, btw.

Up next: finishing Chapter 6. It’s actually mostly done, and there’s just a bit of action in the middle I have to figure out. This is a loooong one.

In other news: I’m rereading the Grisha Trilogy now that I finally got my hands on physical copies. My kinda odd opinion is that while everyone seems to hate how slow and political the second book is, I kinda like that aspect. I think Bardugo is veryyyy good at political intrigue, which is why I liked the first half of King of Scars but not the second half and why I probably will never finish that duology.

C’est tout!