Writing a novel: Month 1

My first month of seriously attempting to write fiction was a success in the most important respect.  Whenever I sat down to write, I really enjoyed it!  The rest hardly matters at this point.

My first writing session, I just wrote a bunch of random thoughts, which coalesced into an alternate history story.  Around the end of WWII, aliens settle on the moon and proceed to ignore us.  This kickstarts the space race, where both the US and the USSR try to be Earth's first representatives to the aliens.  In the 1950s, the US makes it to the moon, and of course the first thing they do is steal alien technology.  In the next decades, the US reverse-engineers fusion power, which wins them the Cold War prematurely.

With a limitless supply of energy, this makes the US a utopia, except that economic disparity means it's only a utopia for some.  There is a three-tiered class system, with aristocrats, service workers, and the unemployed plebeians.  Service workers use their smiles and good manners to provide the one thing that free energy cannot.  The plebeians of course are stereotyped as ugly and rude.  As for the aliens, they don't figure into the present story for... um... reasons.

Wait, didn't I want to write a slice-of-life instead of speculative sci-fi?  Also I couldn't think of a front-story to go with the back-story.  Well, let's scrap that one then.

It's okay, I got another, which I'm sticking to.  My new story follows a main character, and a sequence of relationships (not all romantic) with four different people.  I guess the main character is ace--I mean, of course--but that's not really the point of the story.  It's a story primarily about friendships, especially friendships gone wrong.

For some reason, I'm really attached to the idea of describing characters, not directly, but through the limitations in their perspectives.  Thus the story is told in 3rd person limited, occasionally alternating points of view.

This is the kind of story with lots of characters.  Each major character is also associated with a different group of friends.  For example, the first relationship is a childhood friend, who happens to be part of an ethnic minority (to be invented).  Their transethnic friendship is strained by the fact that they both now have ethnically homogenous groups of friends.  yada yada I'm not giving it all away, anyway I haven't written it yet.

Um, would anyone be willing to be a test reader?  Not right away of course. So far I've just written a rough outline, and part of the first chapter.

I will share more updates in the future.