And only then, only once I felt I had a new and stronger skeleton to hang this story upon, did I start writing again. Most of part one, Exogenesis, remained the same. And some of part two. But everything after that, I wrote from scratch. There was no Bughunt in the original version of To Sleep. No visit to Sol. No trip to Cordova. No nightmares, no Maw, no Unity, no grand adventure beyond 61 Cygni.

In essence, I wrote an entirely new book—and not a small one—over the course of 2018 and the first half of 2019. During the same time, I also wrote and edited The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm, toured for it in the U.S. and Europe, and continued to tour the U.S. for the entirety of 2019 as Barnes & Noble’s writer in residence. Whew!

Writing and editing To Sleep has been by far the hardest creative challenge of my life. I had to relearn how to tell a story, rewrite a book I’d been laboring over for years, and overcome a number of personal and professional challenges.

Was it worth it? I think so. And I’m looking forward to putting the skills I’ve learned/reacquired to use on a new book. One that, if all goes well, will take substantially less than nine years to write and publish.

In looking back over the history of this project, it feels in no small part like a dream. So much time has passed. So much angst and effort and ambition. I finished the first draft while spending the winter split between a dingy apartment in Edinburgh and a slightly brighter apartment in Barcelona. Revisions were carried out where I live in Montana, but also at a dozen different locations across the globe as work, and life, took me about. The final edits were carried out during a pandemic.

When I first got the idea for To Sleep, I was in my mid-twenties. Now I’m in the latter half of my thirties. When I started, there was no white in my beard. Hell, I didn’t even have a beard! Now the first streaks of frost have appeared. I’ve even gotten married, and that’s been an adventure all its own.…

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars isn’t perfect, but it’s the best version of this story I could write, and I’m proud of the final result. To quote Rolfe Humphries from the foreword to his translation of The Aeneid: “The scope of an epic requires, in the writing, a designed variety, a calculated unevenness, now and then some easy-going carelessness.”

All very true. I’m also fond of what he says further on: