My story “Moon by Moon We Go Together” was published in the anthology Triangulation: Habitats in August, 2021. Triangulation is a yearly anthology published by Parsec, Inc., a Pittsburgh-based sci fi and fantasy organization. For the past three years, the theme for Triangulation has been centered around environmental issues. This year, it was sustainable habitats. I’ve actually been submitting to the Triangulation anthology for years and was delighted when this story found a home there.
The story of how “Moon by Moon We Go Together” is actually pretty simple. A few years ago, I wrote a short story, “Polaris in the Dark,” which was published in the 2018 Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide. I have since expanded that story into a middle grade science fiction novel that I have been working on with my agent. In the short story and the novel, the main character is an indentured servant on a space train orbiting Saturn. The novel focuses a lot on the child indenture system in outer space, but one of the things that isn’t included in the novel is how this system came to be.
When you build a world for a science fiction or fantasy project, there’s a lot of information that you come up with as the author but never makes it into the book, either because there isn’t room or it isn’t relevant to the story you’re telling. There are a lot of different theories and approaches to worldbuilding, more than i can cover in this page, but generally my method is to know more about the world than is included in the book. That way, the extra knowledge I have sort of bleeds onto the page, and readers pick up on the idea that there is so much more to this world lurking around the edges of the story, and this makes the world feel more real to them. This is what my beta readers tell me, anyway.
So even though I’m not including the origins of the child indenture system in my space adventure story, I still wanted to explore how it came to be. Then I saw the call for submissions and this year’s theme for Triangulation. Sustainable habitats, and everything fell into place for me.
While the idea was relatively simple, writing the story was another matter. I was trying to tell a story that spanned almost 450 years, and I was trying to make it engaging for readers. It needed to have plot and characters readers could get behind. It wasn’t just an entry in a history book. Given the timeline of the story, I decided to write my first draft in an epistolary format: emails, journals, video messages, etc. In this first draft, I only had two journal entries from Blue’s perspective, one at the beginning and one at the end. But I decided I needed more from Blue to give the story more of a through line. In my first draft, I also had a video message from a grumpy Australian man working on a prison colony in the Asteroid Belt. His name was Winston, and he amused me greatly, but as fun as he was to write, I cut him in favor of more of Blue’s journal.
The problem with the epistolary format was that I needed characters to explain things so the reader would understand, but it came across very “as you know, Bob,” which is a highly technical term we writers use to mean that a character is saying something for the benefit of the audience rather than the story. It’s very unnatural, and it was actually taking away from the characters’ development. I waffled about what to do about this problem, and eventually tried rewriting the story in a more traditional form, with scenes with characters and action and dialogue. If this didn’t work, I was also considering a middle ground, where Blue’s story would be told in scene and the other characters’ stories would be in letter, blog post, or transcript form as I had originally written it. But writing it all out in scene worked so well I never tried that middle ground. Writing it out in scene allowed me to weave the explanations the reader needs more seamlessly into the narrative and allowed the characters and their stories to shine.
“Moon by Moon We Go Together” is probably the most complicated and ambitious short stories I have ever written. I am so, so happy it is part of the Triangulation: Habitats anthology. Yes, it is a story about how a future society created a horrible system of child indenturement in its push to expand across the solar system, but I think that reflects sustainability efforts here on Earth, well-meaning, critically important efforts that sometimes leave people behind or have unintended consequences (look at the discourse around plastic straws and people with disabilities). Beyond that, though, I wanted ‘Moon by Moon” to be a story of accountability and hope, of recognizing past failures and striving, even in the face of what seem like insurmountable obstacles, always striving to do better.
If you read “Moon by Moon We Go Together,” I’d love to know what you think. I really hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Finally, I have one fun fact for you. The song “Moon by Moon We Go Together,” which I wrote for this story and also used for the title, is sung to the tune, basically, of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” I’m normally a bit more creative when I’m including songs in my writing, but I was coming up blank for a tune for this one, and “Twinkle Twinkle” seemed pretty appropriate.