As you can probably tell from the rather poorly made banner above (sorry, I had an all-nighter last night), the tentative title of my next novel is The Collapse. I’ve decided to handle NaNoWriMo 2009 much differently than I’ve handled NaNo in the past. This is the first time I will be returning to a world I’ve already created in order to write a story. If you’ve read my NaNo 2008 novel, The Typist, then the cover above should easily explain itself and lend to what this novel is going to be about. But why am I doing this?

This novel is going to be short. In fact, I don’t plan on breaching 50,000-60,000 words. I’ve determined that, after four years of gradually increasing my novel length, it’s time to cut back a bit and spend more time focusing on what I feel is the work of most merit – and that is, without a doubt, The Typist. I’m well on my way to having a completed and partially rewritten second draft, and I feel that if I explore the universe I’ve created more I’ll get a better grasp on it, ultimately leading to a better novel that I can submit to agents and publishers.

So, The Collapse will be a short novella. In fact, it is a distant prequel to The Typist, set during the time period just before Cydia’s destruction. For those of you who read The Typist, Cydia was destroyed in a planet-wide cave-in caused by excavation of the planet’s core resource, Taconic Slate. There were several key members of the Cydian government involved with the resuscitation and rescue of Cydia’s population after the planet began to collapse – the prevailing plan was to force all inhabitants to abandon their physical bodies to be temporarily stored in a memory bank at the center of the newly destroyed Cydia, to wait until either a new home planet was found or some circumstances made the planet livable once again.

However, I don’t want to dwell too much on the actual collapse of Cydia. Rather, this novel will focus on a new main character – in fact, the entire story will be brand new and unheard of – who works in a Cydian mine. I’m quite sure this novel will also be written in first person, so the main character will lead the reader through an account by which the planet’s collapse was orchestrated, while focusing on a problem far beyond mining.

In addition, the novel will cover several plot elements not discussed in detail in The Typist – such as Cydia’s relationship with Earth in the distant past. This novel will most likely take place right as the Cydia-Earth relationship was blooming, where fetches are new technology and glasses are typically worn on the face – this is not the Cydia that was presented in The Typist by any stretch of the imagination.

A few characters from The Typist will make a return, but they will be limited to those introduced as native Cydians. Specifically, Maiya will make an appearance. She was a character who popped into The Typist and then was completely forgotten about by the end (my huge mistake). I plan to change that in my rewrite of The Typist, but I feel she also needs a greater back story. You’ll find out how Maiya became involved with The Collective, and what her role in the planet’s destruction truly was.

So there you have it – NaNo 2009 will be brief, but hopefully exciting and, for me, eye-opening, allowing me to focus on and expand a universe I feel deserves some more attention and detail to help me create a realistic and engrossing world for The Typist. And, in the meantime, I will continue to work on my second draft of The Typist… and see where things go from there.