Hey, from Kansas!

Hey, guys!

So. I suppose I should introduce myself, eh? I'm Tristan, I'm seventeen, and I definitely love writing. I've actually been doing it since I was... oh, twelve? I've won NaNoWriMo three times, but I only count this last one because everything else I've written has been more or less trash. In 2014 I did a fantastic piece about time-traveling vikings and in 2012 I did a post apocalyptic piece about people who survive by living on a city made of blimps and wherein the apocalypse is caused by a gigantic methane belch from the gulf of Mexico. Whatever works, I guess.

And we don't talk about 2011, where I tried to write a story about a hypothetical Apollo 18 mission to the moon. I didn't know how to plot yet, nor did I fully understand dialogue, and somehow the astronauts ended up crashing in Antarctica and living amongst the penguins for a while. Don't ask me, I have no idea.

That brings us to... today. Today, I'm currently working on what I consider to be the climax of these other failures: a trilogy, of which the first draft for the first book is done at 110k words. Its premise is.. something different. I went broader with this one. Some might say too broad, but... we'll see where it ends up. It's the story of twelve people on a spaceship headed for the edge of the universe, their interactions with each other and all that jazz. I decided to go with hard sci-fi for this, so I went and took a few weeks to actually design a ship that could plausibly do this (For those wondering, it's a bussard ramjet engine that plays with time dilation to get to places faster) and christened it the Gaia.

The story of the Gaia is a long one. How do I know this? Because they haven't even left the solar system yet. I finished the first draft for the first book at 110k and I'm 15k into the second book, and they are still inside the sun's sphere of influence. Already there've been mutinies, love affairs, mechanical failures, a stowaway, all things that you'd expect. I'll be honest, I'm totally excited about the prospect of making this. It's served to keep me sane at times- whenever I'm frustrated or sad or anything, I can use that emotion to write a frustrated or sad tone more realistically. It's helped me survive junior year (so far) and I'm definitely looking forward to finishing the saga... whenever that happens. I still have no idea. We'll see where it goes from here.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and thanks for welcoming me into the community! I know that my time here will be awesome. Until next time.

-Tristan

I'm not even totally sure how querying works, if I'm being honest. I figure two things: one, that I should finish the whole thing first and then go and refine everything down until it's perfect; and two, that no company would take someone as young as me seriously, anyway. I'll probably work on finishing this thing over the next year or two and then start that process. That seems like the most logical thing to do.

I'll be honest, I have had fantasies about paying for college with writing money. Something tells me that that exact scenario won't come to pass, but, ya know. In any case, it's a long time yet before I'm finished here, editing and revising notwithstanding. My plan right now is to hand the first book off to a couple friends and have them read through it while I start making inroads into the second, and then we'll plan from there.

I'll have to look up Jake, I haven't heard his story. That is definitely interesting, though. I'll have to rethink my strategy of waiting until I turn twenty after all.