One of the hardest parts of working on Otters In Space 4 is letting all the lessons I’ve learned about how to write “well” over the last sixteen years fall away, and let myself just write down what I know about this amazing little universe I’ve made.
Otters In Space has always been about telling the reader what’s going on with the cats & dogs, the politics between them, and the changes in their world. I’ve learned in the last 16 years to encode those kinds of messages in scenes where you show what’s happening… but…
Sometimes showing is just so much clunkier and more inefficient than telling.
At a deep level, Otters In Space is a kind of messed up allegory — it’s what I see in the real world, translated into something I can understand, because I understand dogs & cats better than humans.
So, when I let all the lessons I’ve learned about how to write well just fall away… The words flow so easily. Because I know this universe, and I know the story I want to tell. But it’s not a story about a single character or even a group. It’s a story about a whole world.
And you can’t show a whole world in a 50k snapshot. At least, not by trying to embed every change and every meaningful thing into a scene…
But you can just tell those things to people. And it’s okay to do that. Hell, it’s how I wrote the first three Otters In Space books.
And if my clunky, novice, beginner’s writing style was good enough for Otters In Space 1-3, it’s sure as hell gonna be good enough for Otters In Space 4.
Sometimes trying to be Good Enough gets in the way of just telling the story.
And Otters In Space is a hell of a story.