Dispatches from Fourteen Light-Years Away
No. 3 · Things My Alien Hero Got Wrong This Week · May 22, 2026
Writing update from the trenches: I’m about 32,000 words into the current draft, and my hero Tavaan just tried to pay my heroine Noa a compliment.
On his planet, telling someone they smell good is the highest form of non-physical admiration. It’s reserved for people you respect deeply. You might say it to a mentor, a lifelong colleague, or the human woman who reorganized your filing system in a single day and has spent every day since collecting soil from places she wasn’t supposed to go.
He said it in front of Tess. Noa already knows he’s more than a research partner, and hearing it out loud, with an audience, made everything worse.
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He’s not wrong. In his framework, he just told her she’s extraordinary. He chose the words carefully, waited until the moment felt right, and even rehearsed, which is not what I expected from a man who manages an entire agricultural district and hasn’t shown visible emotion in forty years.
But Noa’s not wrong either. A seven-foot-four alien who can’t control his body’s visible reaction to her every time she walks into the room just leaned in and told her she smells good in front of the station administrator.
She’s already distant because he knew they were married and didn’t tell her. This did not help.
He can’t hide what her proximity does to him. He’s seven foot four. There’s nowhere for it to go. They both know, and both of them would rather eat gray nutrient paste than acknowledge it out loud.
I’m going to need some creative effort to get them out of this.
The funniest scenes to write are the ones where both characters are completely right and completely wrong at the same time, and neither of them knows it.
Current word count: 32,000. I’m having a great time. He is not.
If you want to see how this particular disaster resolves, the first book in the series is available for pre-order now.
Hit reply and tell me: what’s the worst compliment you’ve ever received? Something someone meant genuinely but that landed completely sideways. I collect these for research and I will absolutely use them.
Signing off, Millie
P.S. Next time: the gray nutrient packs. He’s been leaving them at her workspace every morning. She’s been eating them out of politeness. Neither of them is having a good time, and only one of them knows why.
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