Introducing Project Nexus

50th Issue

Dec 04, 2023

Hi friends,

Our work is best served with more care once it begins to take shape. We cannot relegate it to scraps and scattered musings. I feel this way about a series of stories I’ve written.

For those just joining, my biggest work thus far is “Ithaka1”, a seven-part serial telling the story of a detective who unintentionally sparks interplanetary conflict during a murder investigation. Our hero unravels a mystery that begins centuries before, but what was possible in between interested me. The action takes place on Minos, a goldilocks planet far from Earth, inhabited by a culturally advanced society that prioritizes communities of care. How they got there could be the subject of lifetimes. I could make legends and folklore, form constellations in the sky2.

I build stories in layers. Perhaps one idea forms some gossamer thin film, but as I go along, more is added thread by thread. “Ithaka” first came from observing ostentatious shows of wealth. The billionaires of the world owned anything imaginable but it was never enough. SpaceX was a flutter in my periphery and a headline caught my eye. My thought: “What’s to stop rich people from owning a planet?”

Why not?

Pieces fell one by one into the bits of the original composition which included the planet Minos, three orbiting moons, and the main character, Anaella Bahn, marching through a field of tall grass to find a mud-caked body in a clearing.

All stories and essays in that universe will now be under its own tab: Project Nexus.

AI image, black woman — Photo generated by Midjourney; ID: Curly-haired woman with silver-colored clothes sanding in tall grass

The tab will include a composite of fiction stories from different times and places on Minos along with distant history on Earth and the path between the two planets. While I may stray from the Project, I am never far away and there will be more insights, artwork, and fiction to enjoy. See you there.