So my book is available on Amazon. There’s a few people following me (most of whom probably don’t even know about this blog yet, heh), and I’m 100% sure that they don’t have the slightest clue how this story came about.
Mostly because I’ve never really told anyone.
So I’m going to tell that story. Not the story so much of how I came up with the ideas, but the story of the ideas themselves. The evolution they went through to arrive at the point they’re at now.
So right off the bat, I want to give some insight into the current form, because virtually nobody’s bought the book (and absolutely nobody had read it), so anyone reading this will have no clue what’s going on.
For starters, the characters aren’t human. Well, they’re not normal humans, anyways. They’re all members of a species of humans called Draughtgen. They’re the descendants of a group of genetically-engineered super-soldiers, created in the United States near the end of a global war that lasted almost two hundred years. They were supposed to win the war, and they did, but it was too late for the ole US of A. So they formed their own nation. Seven hundred years later, that nation, known as the Draughtgen Empire, is a new superpower. Mankind has discovered how to make the Alcubierre metric (a real-world solution in general relativity that would allow for faster-than-light, non-local travel) and spread out into the galaxy. They’ve encountered a few aliens, but not many.
The Empire, as it’s known in the book, is the biggest superpower among the various species of humans alive at this time. Essentially, they’re the in-universe equivalent of the USA. So far (meaning in the book, as well as in the portion of the sequel which I’ve already written), they’ve been an almost entirely neutral or benevolent force in the galaxy. This isn’t to say that they’re entirely benevolent, but the books are written from the POV of a young, patriotic soldier. We’ll see if his views change in future works.
With that being said, the Empire is very militaristic. Over ten percent of citizens are part of the Imperial Defense Force, their military. The main character, Jimmy Adams, is the son of two veterans himself. The galaxy is mostly peaceful and stable, but not entirely. And the galaxy is very big. So there’s always some conflicts going on, and there’s always at least one which the Empire is driven to stick its nose into.
On top of this, one of the alien species they’ve encountered is shockingly hostile to humanity. They don’t have the technology or military might to present a major threat to human space at large, but are nonetheless the boogeyman for the people of those planets closest to their territory.
So that’s pretty much the situation at the start of the first book. Now, let me share how that evolved.
I was much younger when the first seeds of the idea came to me. It was based on my ruminations about the different cliques in high school and how those cliques might form tribes. There was a Rap Crew, (they didn’t really call it hip-hop back then), a gang of redneck Good-Ole-Boys, a sports-jock Alterna-rock Team, a Grunge Gang and a Goth Coven. The Goth Coven were the ones most interesting to me, because I was dating a goth girl at the time.
The first version was shockingly different than the current. It was a post-apocalyptic, YA adventure that followed a small group of goths (plus one representative of each of the other tribes) on their adventures in the wastelands of a major city, several years after a plague had killed everyone younger than 11 and older than 18. What adventures, you ask? I dunno. I never actually came up with a plot.
Meanwhile, I’d had another idea, this one more fully formed. I called it “The Berseker”, and it was an edgy comic book about a genetically-engineered super-soldier who escapes from the government lab that had produced him. In this story, the Berserker himself was a prisoner who’d volunteered for the Captain America treatment in exchange for time off his sentence, only to be betrayed and told he’d never be let go, as they needed to study him. Those studies would end with vivisection, so naturally, he wanted to get free. The first version of that story followed him as he made friends with a young orphan girl, escorting her across the country to find her mother’s best friend after her parents had died, and an evil aunt had been granted custody. Sound cliche? Yeah, I know. I was young.
Time went on, and I fleshed out the post-apoc tribal story. Not with an actual plot, mind, but with world-building. I defined military tactics of the different tribes, invented and discarded and changed characters, etc, etc. There was still no hint of the Goth Coven being militaristic or super-soldiers of any stripe. In fact, their fighting was based on the fact that they wore a lot of black, so they must fight like ninjas, right? So they dealt in espionage, assassinations and hit-and-run tactics. To quote Commander Worf, ‘they fight without honor.”
As things in my own life changed (including a stint in the Army), I revised this. All of the tribes became more militaristic, including the Goths. The first hints of them being fundamentally different was when I decided that vampires would be a huge source of inspiration and iconography for them. I had them develop advanced dentistry; giving all of their fighters sharp vampire fangs.
Meanwhile, the Berserker story had evolved as well. It was no longer about a genetically modified soldier, set in modern-day America, but another (different) post-apocalyptic story. This one was a zombie apocalypse, with a hefty dose of “my zombies are different“. WARNING: That’s a TV Tropes link. If you get sucked in and lose several hours of your life, don’t blame me.
Instead, this new version of the Berserker followed a simple man, an office-worker with no real survival skills who desperately tries to keep his family alive during a pandemic in which infected people often become hyper violent. Think 28 Days Later style zombies, but with a few unique twists. A third of the way into the book, he fails spectacularly, and is forced to watch helplessly as a group of bandits rape and kill his children. His wife and he are kept alive; to be sold into slavery, but are beaten and tortured, and of course, they have their way with his wife as well. Remember, this was supposed to be edgy. In any event, when they finally kill his wife after a failed escape attempt, something in him snaps. He goes berserk and kills the bandits, then goes on the road to find the rest of them and murder them.
That story ended with the man confronting the leader of the bandits in a nuclear silo, where he’s so enraged that he sets off a nuke. And then he wakes up, decades later in an America that’s being slowly rebuilt, with no explanation of how he became the Berserker or survived the blast. And truth be told, I might still write that story, though I’ve made some additional changes to it, since. It’s now part of a larger world, with more stories set in it, and now that I mention it, I’m almost certain I will one day write those stories.
But the important thing was that I’d gotten both of those stories into the same kind of setting. Which led me down several avenues of thought, merging them together. And that’s where the current world of my book really started to take shape.
I made the goths not goth teenagers who’d survived, but socially-immature super-soldiers who’d won their war, and now had no society left into which they could be integrated. So they formed their own. They were still goth as hell, only their vampire fangs were now the result of their genetic engineering, allowing them to survive on the blood of their enemies.
They held this form for a long time. I never came up with a plot or story to tell, set in that world. But I held onto the ideas. With the Berserker idea no longer using the genetic engineering shtick, I ran with it. I catalogued the changes that would happen, and became fascinated by what their psychology would be like. You see, soldiering is as much mental as it is physical, so the traits they’d had spliced into their genes wouldn’t just be physical.
At the end of the day, I had decided that they’d be very nerdy. ADHD and high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome would be the norm for them. Only they’d also be very physical, engaging in a lot of touching with each other, to distinguish them from humans with those very real conditions. It was during this time that the heavy goth influences got mostly dropped. Which is somewhat ironic, because I was searching not just for the logical answers to the question of what their psychology would be like, but also for a way for their psychology to explain why a bunch of hardened veterans would turn in lace-and-leather bedecked, black-lipsticked goths.
Instead, they ended up being nostalgic for an America that never was. The America of The Wonder Years, and of Conservative political fantasies. Why did they become like this? Well, because I wanted to not have to sit there and think through every cultural question about them, basically. I wanted to take this futuristic, goth-trending, highly militaristic society of weirdos and push them in a direction in which I’d be able to write about them using outlooks and personalities that wouldn’t be entirely alien to modern day people. So by taking this wildly progressive ideal, and then overcompensating to the right, I arrived at a society which resembles our own, in all but technology and the specifics of the government.
And that’s pretty much it. There’s details in the book: I included some additional information at the end, about the world in which it’s set.
The first plot I came up with in this new world didn’t follow Jimmy Adams, but rather a team of near-future astronauts, testing a brand new drive technology, who get catapulted hundreds of years into the future, and find themselves in this world.
And again, that’s a story I will probably write one day. One of the characters from it will actually be making an appearance in the sequel to Operational Realities, near the end. It’s just a cameo really, but it’s going to be the same guy.
The plot with Jimmy started with a totally different idea: What if an elite operator found himself stuck on a colony ship headed out to the middle of nowhere? And what if he had to form up a new military and fleet to protect said colony from an alien invasion?
That was going to be much less action-focused than what I eventually wrote, more keyed to the technology and engineering challenges of bootstrapping up a modern military from some colonist gear (even if it is futuristic colonist gear). Some of this still shines through when I get into the nitty gritty of the tech. In the second book, there’s more of this, including the Frankenship, which the main characters cobble together from two military ships and a cargo container.
I thought up more stories, including one which makes me giggle every time I think of it, because it’s a ripoff of the Lord of the Rings, complete with countless veiled references to Tolkien’s masterpiece. One of them was “what if future tech made zombie apocalypses not just a real threat, but something which occasionally had to be dealt with?”
Of course, in any good zombie work, the zombies can’t be the real antagonists, so I had to make some people the bad guys. And then I decided to turn that up a notch, and make them space Nazis, because then the main character doesn’t have to feel bad about killing them.
Well, that evolved from human space Nazis to sorta-human space eugenicists, because I found that worked better.
But there was a problem, you see. I was never, over the literal decades in which I’d formed these idea, ever motivated to write. I mean, I tried, countless times. I never got further than ten pages, though. Into any of these stories or the half-dozen others that have been floating around in my head.
Until one day, talking to a friend of mine about the Army, an idea hit me. What if the main character was one of the most elite soldiers in the galaxy, but also a very flawed human character, who was driven to excel by sheer stubborn rage against the voice in his head constantly telling him he wasn’t good enough? I knew that in my own life, my own insecurities were a constant presence, and when I became frustrated with them and got bound and determined to prove them wrong… Well, that’s when I accomplished things I never thought I could.
With that in mind, one day, on a whim, I started writing. I fully expected my motivation to dry up just as quickly as it had every other time, but it didn’t. I made four versions from that template: One who overcompensates for his self-doubt with grim determination and sarcastic, self-effacing humor. Another who overcompensates with flamboyant displays of affection to those she deems worthy of her attentions. A third who overcompensates with bro-ey bluster and bravado. And a fourth who compensates with honest introspection and calm patience.
And I fell in love with these characters. My intentions for the plot were very different when I sat down to write from how the plot actually turned out, and most of those changes came as a surprise to me. I didn’t decide to change things, I discovered that they were different to what I expected.
And that brings us to now.
I hope somebody enjoyed reading this. I know I’m just typing into the void right now, but maybe one day I’ll find enough success that someone will come back and read this, and find something inspiring or at least entertaining here.