Dispatches from Fourteen Light-Years Away
No. 4 · The Wrong Shelf · May 25, 2026
The draft is getting close to done, and I spent most of this weekend writing one scene over and over until it worked.
Tavaan built Noa a shelf. I should back up.
She’s five foot six. She can’t reach the counters or the storage on the station, and she’s been climbing on crates to get to her own lab samples since she arrived.
He built her a shelf overnight. It’s crooked because he used agricultural tools, which are the only tools he has. The brackets don’t quite line up and the whole thing leans to the left, and when she asks about it he delivers a formal report on the structural specifications like he’s filing quarterly crop data.
✦ · ✦ · 🚀 · ✦ · ✦
That was the plan for this scene: heroine roasts him, hero logs the insult as a compliment.
She started crying instead.
She wasn’t crying about the shelf. She’s been on this station for weeks with everything built for someone two feet taller, handling it fine, and then she walks into the lab one morning and something is finally at her height. He measured her while she was asleep and doesn’t think that’s weird.
He used agricultural tools because those are the only tools he has.
When he asks if the shelf is unsatisfactory, she says, “You can’t just—” and doesn’t finish the sentence. He logs the incomplete statement for later analysis. The shelf was in my outline, but her reaction wasn’t, and I ended up going back and reworking three earlier scenes to set it up properly.
The first book in the series is available for pre-order now.
Hit reply and tell me about a time someone fixed something for you without you asking. Bonus points if they did it badly and that made it better.
Signing off, Millie
P.S. Next time: the TBR pile. I’m reading three books instead of finishing my own, and I have no plans to stop.