Reflections on Voyage Embarkation

Sunday, July 13, 2025 at 9:00am

My recently initiated re-read of Voyage Embarkation has prompted a number of new observations. Most of these will be making their way into the expanded back-matter I’m writing as I work my way through the novel. However, an assortment of observations won’t fit into that particular mold. The back-matter is already fairly dense as is, so I’ve decided to put them on my blog, perhaps to become the raw material for something larger in the future.

Movements

Looking at the overall chapter listing leads me to feel that the novel can be divided into three basic “movements” or “acts.”

Act I consists of the prologue, “Setting Sail,” “Longing,” “Just a Game,” and “Tria.” In this stage of the novel, I was establishing the main characters, setting up the parameters of Kal’s adventure, and establishing his motivations.

Act II consists of “Corporeal,” “Norselands,” “Duality,” and “Benevolence.” I’m more convinced than ever that these four sections carry most of the novel’s weight. Each one establishes important character traits about Kal and his brother while also advancing the novel’s themes about morality and ethics.

Act III is the rest of the novel: “Nanogen,” “Unpossible,” “Requiescence,” “Liberty,” “Taboo,” and “Ludo.” The advancement of my writing acumen has been less kind to these chapters. While I still think that these chapters do many things well and that the novel overall holds up, this is the weaker section of the novel, perhaps with the exception of “Ludo.”

Anticipating Some Dissatisfaction

At the time of this writing, I’m through chapter six, “Norselands,” of my re-read. So far, my impression of my first novel is largely aligning with the back-matter I wrote in 2020, and my additional notes have been merely expanded observations.

Looking ahead, I’m anticipating one chapter where I will take some strong exception with the opinion and outlook I had when I first wrote that chapter. That chapter is number twelve, “Liberty.”

In brief, Kal gets himself stranded on a hyper-capitalist dictatorship world, and must get himself involved in their workforce in order to survive.

What I expect to find when I arrive at this chapter are numerous details that expound what I thought, back in 2012, constituted harassment and mistreatment in the workplace. Unfortunately, I now possess a much more refined sense of what workplace harassment and abuse actually consist of, and I expect to find the situations that I invented in 2012 naive and blinkered.

There is even the chance that I could decide that I now so vehemently disagree with the narrative thrust of this chapter that I’m unwilling to continue publishing the novel. However, I think that possibility is fairly small. The most likely outcome is that it will suffice for me to excoriate my younger self in the novel’s expanded back-matter.

Growing Different from Your Younger Self

One of the coolest things about writing fiction comes when more than a decade has passed since the initial publication. For about the first five years after one publishes a novel, it still feels like “your” novel. Starting at about the five year mark, it starts to gain a quality that I can only define as feeling historical rather than personal. By the decade mark, that historicalization erupts into something new: the novel feels like something “I made” only in the abstract sense. I chalk that up to the fact that I am now so radically different than I was a decade ago that it’s almost as if a completely different person wrote it.

But, what makes the situation different than a novel actually written by someone else is that, unlike with the other random novelist, there’s a direct, unbroken line connecting the guy I am now with the guy who wrote my novel.

To put this in concrete terms, reading Voyage Embarkation now allows me to experience myself how I was at age 30. How I was at age 20 remains just shards of college memories. It’s essentially lost forever. But age 30 can still be experienced if I just pick up a particular book and spend ten or so hours with it.

This is another reason why I see the chance that I yank the novel from publication upon reading “Liberty” as being extremely low. I might disagree with my former self, but he had his reasons for believing what he believed and thinking the way he did, and they came from a place of legitimate (albeit perhaps limited) experience. Each of us only ever possesses limited experience. We’re only ever doing the best we can with the knowledge we have. And I, personally, will continue to take stands and fight for what I believe in. I will also fess up when I discover I was wrong.