AS THE SECOND novel in The Chaos Chronicles, this book had a special place in the writing process: It was the blur in the outline, the transition book, the gap in the story arc where I'd noted, Here a miracle occurs. I knew more or less where this piece would end, and thus where the next began. But in the middle . . . I didn't know much more than that Bandicut was stranded at the edge of the galaxy, in a ship so enormous it was effectively a world. So when I actually sat down to write Chaos Book 2 (that was its title at the time), my first thought was, WTF?
I was as lost at sea as Bandicut.
In fiction writing, there are various ways writers have of finding their stories.
Some writers figure the whole thing out ahead of time. They know what each chapter is about, who the characters are, and the precise direction things are going. They do all the conceptual brain work before they write the first line. That degree of confidence probably makes the writing go faster. Or so I've heard.
Some writers start without a clue, or with very few. They maybe have a character or two, and a situation, and they dive in and see where the currents take them. This can be an exhilarating way to work. It can also be terrifying, a leap into the unknown, with no guarantee of a readable book at the end.
Most writers probably operate somewhere in between, most of the time.
Me, I've worked with fairly extensive outlines, and I've worked with almost none. Strange Attractors was "almost none." I dove in and swam in chaos, sometimes with the current and sometimes against it and sometimes across it. In chaos theory, a "strange attractor" represents dynamic systems that evolve according to turbulent or unpredictable patterns. So went the writing of this book.
Another way to describe this kind of writing is to call it an act of faith. Throughout the first draft, my recurring thought was, Dear God, please let this all make sense in the end! Or, in darker moods, Dear God, it's going to be stupid, don't let it turn out to be stupid.
In the end, I thought it worked out pretty well. But I'll leave it to you to decide whether I got my wish.
Looking back on my original notes for the series, I see what I knew going in. Here it is: Bandicut was going to meet Ik and Li-Jared and partner up with them. And they were going to face the boojum. That was pretty much it. I didn't expect Antares to appear until book three, and I had no idea we'd be meeting the shadow-people or the magellan-fish or other fractal beings, and I certainly didn't know that the robots were going to evolve into important characters in their own right. The boojum, and later the tree of ice, were mysteries to me, but I had to get to the bottom of them or the whole thing would come apart in my hands. All that happened on the wing late at night . . . like soaring over flashing thunderclouds, with terrifying turbulence, stars gleaming overhead, and music playing in the background (which is more or less how I do most of my writing). That's not a description so much of any given session of writing as of the total experience of thrashing out the story.
Coming down through the clouds at the end of the storm, I was as surprised as John Bandicut when he found himself climbing into a star-spanner bubble with a four-breasted humanoid woman who wasn't sure who she should trust, and with Ik and Li-Jared, and a pair of robots who seemed to be evolving toward sentience. What in the world was going to be next?
A mystery in the deep ocean abyss, on an alien planet, that's what.
Next up: The Infinite Sea.