Years ago, when I was a teenager, I started a blog. I didn’t have any imaginings of a following, or any real idea of what I wanted to say. What I did say was full of fire and fury, the incandescent ramblings of an angsty teen. The polite thing to say would be that I was full of passion. Like most teenagers, definitely more full of passion than sense. This blog will be anything but that.
My aspiration for this blog is to have a space to share my thoughts, processes, and ideas going forward. Everything from world building, short stories, or even novel ideas. As this is the first post, I thought I’d keep things simple. I’ll start with the story of the beginning of my first novel.
All my life, I have imagined environments, worlds, and scenarios pretty much all the time. I have a string of half-idealized, half-completed, and half-impressive creations in my wake. I’ve always wanted to change that.
Just over ten years ago, I had one of those half-impressive creations in mind. I was regretfully inspired by the chaos and calamity of the coming climate crisis to consider where the future could head. So, I extrapolated and imagined what I could. What I came to was the conclusion that humanity needed to expand to advance. So my science fiction novel would start with leaving Earth behind.
Every good science fiction novel acknowledges that humanity has always been flawed and fragile, so there had to be a mishap in the grand plan. What mishap could be worse than the flagship colony ship going missing? That led to the rest of the colony ships having to find a place to crash land. I thought it would be extremely likely that without the leadership of the flagship, humans would balkanize upon arrival. This created the Fifteen Systems.
In November of that year, 2013, I decided I would write down the story of the lost colony and the Fifteen Systems, and so I made my first attempt at NaNoWriMo. I failed miserably, barely scratching out five chapters. None of the characters, planets, or ships had names at this point.
Ten years later. It took ten years to finish writing, editing, and polishing the manuscript to the point I could read it in my sleep. I’ll blog more on this process later.
