This is my first-ever novel. It is about a space ship captain, her life and her space travels.
Chapter 2 seems to be numbered weirdly, but please bear with me – the numbering has its own logic! (Or, trust me, there’s method in my madness! Lol)
I chose Mess the space ship captain as my first ambassador, which is interesting given how much I struggle with actually finishing (finalizing) her story and the novel.
The 1st version had 500+ pages (can you imagine!) and the writing was perhaps good but certainly not awesome – as is often the case with 1st novels I guess. Some time later, I made lots of edits to make the text nicer to read, and I shortened the novel to some 350 pages. At that point, I thought I was done. Not so! I discovered a lot of writing I don’t really like anymore (especially not after writing/editing three more novels). Inadvertent imports from my 1st language that make little sense in English, sentences which do not read smoothly, thoughts and ideas that I don’t think I expressed well, and also some redundancy – repeating the same thought twice, often in the same sentence. So I started another round of edits and small rewrites… I thought this was the final one, but nope nope, yet another round was needed…
Now, about the character and the story. I invented Mess the space ship captain when I was 14, and I actually remember where it happened! It was on a Mediterranean ferry (so if you read chapter 1, you know why about half of it takes place… on a ferry!) and Mess stayed with me ever since. I used to write short stories about her, at first really naive given my age back then. As I grew up, Mess became more and more of a background character in my own life; I was still occasionally thinking about her, but not really adding anything to her story. Then, one day, while on holiday on Guernsey, I just had this funny idea to try writing in English. I picked Mess for that purpose because why not, she was mine and I still felt connection to her… 500+ pages later, I was like, okay everything went better than expected!
Anyway, here we go, enjoy the read.