I started writing Voyager Dawn when I was about thirteen or fourteen, sitting behind the desk at the family business, bored out of my skull. I didn’t really have a plan beyond “I like aircraft, and I like sci-fi, so I’m gonna write about a space pilot.” At the time, I had only previously written one full-length novel, a story about the Hundred Years War I charitably referred to as a “historical epic” despite a remarkable lack of historical accuracy and not being all that epic.
So it should come as no surprise that Voyager Dawn and Vengeful Dawn are… well, they aren’t great. Not by my standards, anyway.
Since then, I’ve learned a heck of a lot more about storytelling, characterization, narration, and have massively reinvented the world of Voyager Dawn to feel like a real place with real people and history in it. I look back on the current iteration of Dawn and cringe at the childish mistakes, from massive plot contrivances to small details that I simply didn’t think through, like military characters referring to each other by their first names (special thanks to a friend of mine in the Navy for pointing that one out).
So, much like Tolkien rewriting The Hobbit to fit the lore of The Lord of the Rings, I am currently re-writing Voyager Dawn and its sequels to bring them up to the standard I know I’m capable of. (Never mind I just ended a sentence with a preposition.)
This means, in part, that while the third book is technically finished, I will not be releasing it as it is. Maybe one day I’ll reveal how the trilogy originally ended, but for now, you’ll have to wait for the rewritten version. Trust me, you’ll like the new one a lot more.
Until the new versions are released (or, heaven forbid, professionally published), I will not be taking down the existing versions of Voyager and Vengeful. So if you want a first edition for posterity or whatever, now’s the time.
Thanks to anyone who’s read the originals, and I hope you stick around for the rewrite.
Copyright 2023 Richard Patton
Voyager Dawn 