Origin Stories -- The Lost Star's Sea

Artwork for a possible cover -- used as an interior illustration in print version

In this series of blog posts I talk about why, and how I came to write my stories. This book is the sequel to The Bright Black Sea, and I find that I have referred back to that book rather frequently in this post. Which, I guess is natural enough, since many of the narrative threads begin in The Bright Black Sea. 

This origin story is, simple. Soon after completing the first section of what became The Bright Black Sea, I decided that Talith Min was not for Wil Litang. And since I had a lot of fun with Wil, Nadine, and the duel, I decided that Nadine and Wil would, eventually, be THE couple. I figured that I could have a lot of fun building a romance that began with a failed assassination. With that in mind, I gave Nadine, a new name, Naylea Cin, and invented the Order of St Bleyth to give her a much more complex and complete backstory. Originally she and her partner were just hired assassins in my mind.

However, in The Bright Black Sea episodes that followed, Nadine, now, Naylea Cin would make only two appearances in Wil Litang’s narrative. Just enough to form a comradeship of sorts. And just enough to set up a believable courtship in the sequel I was planning centered around that courtship. I wanted them thrown together, dependent on the other for their survival. I felt that the tension between the two of them – that of a strange mutual attraction beneath the surface of their adversarial relationship – together with putting them into the position of needing each other to survive would make for a fun story to write.  

Castaways Book Cover as a stand alone book

The problem was that, as the story progressed the idea behind the Four Shipmate’s secret evolved, and in the end the Archipelago of the Tenth Star grew to be far larger than I had initially conceived it to be. Indeed, I had first envisioned the ambush at the end of The Bright Black Sea taking place on a derelict spaceship, perhaps in orbit around some drift world, since I had not, when I decided to write a sequel, determined exactly what the secret of the Four Shipmates was. One possibility, for example was that the secret involved the smuggling of darq gems.Or it might have involved the politics of a small moon world in the distant Alantzia system. Indeed, early on, I had the Taoist adept, Floating Cloud Hermit, seemingly suggest that possibility. (I located the Taoist community with the link the Pela in the Alantzia system to cover what turned out to be a red herring.) But, in the end, the Pela blossomed into something far more than I had originally imagined it to be.

The Archipelago of the Tenth Star’s origins can traced back to the Edgar Rice Burroughs' story Beyond the Farthest Star. The planets in that story had a shared atmosphere. There were also album covers (for the group Yes) back in the day with floating island motifs, and I believe that the movie Avatar also had them as well. However, it was ERB's book that inspired the Pela for me, beginning with a series of paintings I starting in 2012 entitled “The Archipelago of the Three Lovers.” They depicted floating islands suspended in the space between three planets or moons rotating around a fixed point who shared a common atmosphere. I’ve used some of those painting to illustrate this post, since I lifted the Pela from that concept. I am actually using a detail from one of those early paintings as the current cover of The Lost Star’s Sea. In any event, as the Pela grew ever vaster, it became increasingly hard to imagine how Naylea and Wil would ever find their way back to the Nine Star Nebula. Clearly it would take more than my original shipwreck story to round out the book.

Everyday life on an island in the Pela

So with the expansion of the Pela, I had gotten Naylea and Wil into a situation where I had no idea how to get them out of it. Still, even if I hadn’t, I would've needed a much longer story simply because I did not care to have the two volume set of The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star’s Sea to look like the Laurel and Hardy of books – one very fat volume, the other very thin. So one way or another I had to write more episodes after the castaway episode. At least, with the vastness of the Pela I had given myself a wide canvas to work in.

The first issue I had to deal with was that I did not want to stretch the Naylea/Wil romance out over three hundred thousand words, for the fear that it would get tedious. I needed to find a way to put their romance on hold, yet again. As with many things during the writing of these stories, I found that in the backstory I had created for Cin, I could be used to make a reasonable case to throw a spanner into the gears of romance, and so I used it. Just another case in which some seemingly unimportant details, her background, and her father, inserted for to flesh out her motives, proved useful in ways I had not anticipated.

Siss

And speaking of things not anticipated, we have another great example of this in the character of Siss. She was tossed in for a spot of color when first introduced at the cave entrance back in The Bright Black Sea. She, and her kids, made a second appearance aboard ship in the Talon Hawk attack which I wrote just for laughs. The same could be said for her first appearance in The Lost Star’s Sea. But it seems that she steals every scene she’s in, and quickly blossomed into a full fledged character on her own.

If you happen to own the first ebook edition of The Bright Black Sea, you’ll find that the sentry serpent is described a feathered snake. When I started writing Castaways, I realized that Siss being a snake would be too limiting, so that I revised her into a feathered crocodile and then had to go back to The Bright Black Sea and revise my description of her. The reason for all this work was that, as I said, she steals every scene she’s in, being such a fun character to write – a Harbo Marx with teeth. And when it came time for her and Cin to exit stage right for a few episodes, I felt compelled to bring on a replacement, in the form of Hissi, who’s a chip off the old block, and with a character all her own. And she proved to be just as much fun to write as Siss was. I have avoided having “aliens” in my stories, as they’re needless complications to the types of stories I write and they don’t really interest me. However, that said, the dragons of the Pela somehow, without trying, became my aliens, though I can’t rule out more aliens somewhere in the Pela.

One of the Archipelago of the Three Lovers paintings

To fill out the rest of what would become The Lost Star’s Sea I wrote episodes that drew on all sorts of things from my past. I felt that Wil needed to be on his own, away from the security of the ship’s boat. So I brought in some South Sea type natives to do the job.

Since I try to use as much dialog as I can to tell my stories, I also needed a new companion for Wil. Enter, KaRaya. KaRaya began life in my imagination as the stereotypical carefree, roving Irishman. A free spirit who gets into and out of trouble, one way or another. However, I try very hard to turn old stereotypes on their heads when I can. I also try to make an effort to include female characters, and female characters who have just as much agency as my male ones have. So I recast the role of Wil’s pal as a female carefree, roving spirit who seems to get into and out of trouble. One way or another.

It is always telling how, when I come to putting in minor characters into the story, that the default is always to use the traditional sex in the role. For example, when Py, KaRaya, and Wil would arrive at a community, the natural tendency would be for it to be ruled by a monk, a man. I tried to keep that tendency in mind. Thus, for one example, most of the people in charge of the communities were woman. I probably don’t always avoid falling into the old default roles, but I try.

Another Archipelago of the Three Lovers Paining

The first episode after Naylea’s departure was a sort of South Sea Adventure. And then, the episode after the crash landing and meeting the Laezan Magistrate LinPy, I had kung-fu movies and some books I read about exploring China in the early years of the last century. With a little bit of Scotland thrown in for good measure. The following episode, the gold rush episode, was inspired by a couple of books I read about the Yukon gold rush of ‘99. And a Donald Duck Little Big Book. Somehow I recall this children’s book, with Pegleg Pete, set in Alaska, and I think involves a treasure in a totem pole. In any event, I have this image of a sort of western town set against the backdrop of dark pines – an image I used to construct in my head, the town of Chasm Lake. It is little bits of memories like that that get mixed into my stories.

A cover I cobbled together for the beta reader's version of  The Mountain of Gold

The next episode, a sea story inspired piece, dealt with the discovery of the great ship from somewhere, and a mutiny. At the core of this episode was yet another one of those strange happenstances where a rather trivial item tossed into the story for color, in this case the darq gem, became a key ingredient of the story. So too, were the red feathered visitor early in Castaways, and their reappearance later on with the great ship. Once again, they were tossed in to the story for color and mystery with no definite purpose other than that in mind. I figured I could use them down the line, maybe, but if not, well, I’d have been content to let them remain a mystery of the Pela. In any event, all these random little ingredients came together quite nicely.

At this point in the story, I figured it was time to bring back some early characters and settings, so Py, Naylea, Siss, Captain EnVey, and Blade Island all made their reappearances. This reunion was followed by yet another sea story inspired story line that ended with the reappearance of an old nemesis, the Talon Hawks.

Another cobbled together cover for the Floating Jungle Episode, a detail from an Archipelago of the Three Lovers painting modified in Gimp

It was about this point in the writing process when I finally figured out how I wanted to wrap this book up. I must admit that I thought the ending I came up with was rather brilliant. It allowed me to tie up a whole slew of loose ends that happened “off camera” and suggest a solution to the mystery of the Dragon Kings, and how humans, and feathered humans came to the Pela. Plus it gave me the chance to bring back almost all of the main and a minor character from The Bright Black Sea, most just for cameos, but in the case of Botts and Trin, for major roles.

This narrative line leading to the story’s end, began with another trek across a slightly more Chinese inspired landscape, along with meeting a classic Taoist inspired “immortal” in the form of Tey Pot, and, of course, classical bandits from the barbarian side of the island. And then, finally our heroes make it to the escape hatch from the Pela, The Hermitage. I had always considered the best way to get my characters back to the Nine Star Nebula was via a secret connection to the Pela by the order of Taoist in the Nine Star Nebula. And the Hermitage provided a much more formal link, to not only the Nine Star Nebula, but to the Laezan communities of the Pela.

The thing is that, by that time my heroes made it to this escape hatch, there seemed no reason for them to return to the Nine Star Nebula. They had established new lives in the Pela, and I could come up with no compelling reason to return them to the Nine Star Nebula proper. At least not yet.

The Hermitage did allow the reappearance of Botts. Botts was another one of those character who was just tossed in at the time of its initial introduction with no plans to use it, only to blossom into a very major character as the story progressed. In fact, its major role in the flight from Despar was basically improvised – Botts was a “Yes! Why, of course!” sort of moment while I was writing the escape from Despar, when I realized just how I could use Bott to make their escape through the reef plausible. So I had Botts back in the mix, and with him, the Machine Directorate, and with no need to get my characters back to the Nine Star Nebula, I had time to explore yet another couple of mysteries that I had tossed in at the end of The Bright Black Sea – the great “Dragon Kings,” and the feathered people of the Pela.

Another cobbled together cover for the beta reader's version of the last episode

The episode with the storm and the great black cave with the black serpent dragons was inspired by another childhood memory. I have this impression of watching a kid’s TV show (B&W in the 1950’s) that must have been showing the old movie serial adventures from the late 30’s and 40’s. It had a host, and a frog, that was commanded to “Twank your magic wand, Froggy!” or some such tag line, to start the old serial episode. In one of those old episodes, I seem to remember the floor of some sort of lost jungle temple opening up underneath the feet of the heroes, revealing a black pool with crocodiles swimming in it, just waiting for their next meal to fall down to them. It was this memory – the ancient temple and the crocodiles below that inspired the black serpent episode.

And then, in the spirit of bring back old companions, I brought back good’ol KaRaya, a little older and wiser, while dropping off Py, Trin, and then Naylea and Siss for the final adventure of the Dragon King that would bring word of fate of Litang’s old shipmates from the Lost Star.

After this episode, I felt that ol Wil Litang had earned the rest – and perhaps even that cha garden – that he been long longing for. So, with the promise of Naylea Cin as his in the not too distant future, I gave him a couple of years to get bored all on his own, after meeting a few more old shipmates.

Another Archipelago of the Three Lovers painting

I give my characters in this universe a 200+ lifespan to allow them to have a couple lives worth of adventures, if I can think of them. So there is always a possibility that more of their lives will come my way, and I’ll write them down. But that’s not a given. If I do, I will write and release them episodes by episode, this time around, rather than waiting to string ten of them together. Indeed, I have a setting for another Litang episode, but I don’t really have a story, as such, yet. And I’m not sure just were I’d like to place the story – is he on his way to meet Naylea, or does it take place after they are reunited? We’ll see.

Next up in this series is my origin story for Beneath the Lanterns. This was to be my foray into fantasy. But I found that I could not, in good conscious, write a fantasy story. I have read fantasy books, and still have a number of them on my book shelf, but there is something about fantasy these days, that don’t appeal to me. Tor.com has given me a number of free fantasy books, but I find that I simply can’t – or don’t care to – get more than a couple of pages into them. I guess that I want to read, and write, are stories closer to real life. With magic, anything goes, and I just can’t buy that… But more on that in the next episode. Stat tuned.

The full painting used for The Lost Star's Sea's current ebook cover