Must-Read!

The initial review for First Step is in from Reedsy Discovery and it's a good one: five stars and categorized as a must-read! “A most entertaining and exciting read,” is what the reviewer says and a phrase I’ll use in my social media posts. It’s gratifying to get such praise, especially for a book that I labored over so much. I think back on all the iterations I went through trying to find stories that would click for Eve and for Ray, and how much writing ended up unused. One draft ran 45k words before I trashed it. I toyed with the idea of Eve finding a human footprint by a pond on the alien planet Primis at the end of the first chapter, I wrote quite a long draft of Eve and her fellow astronauts getting washed down a gorge by a flood, and I tried a book with only Ray as the main character. When I finally combined the stories and pruned away repetitiveness in Eve’s journey, the story finally came together the way I wanted. Lots of work went into this one, more than normal, and I’m glad to see it being recognized with a great review.