Work in progress
Unbeliever: Jez, an apprentice on a merchant ship, has a problem with authority, especially with the priesthood and the gods. She knows they exist, the evidence is all around her every day. They move ships between worlds and ensure everyone’s safety. But she still has questions. When the ship finds itself cast adrift between the stars, Jez’s cynicism is blamed for their predicament.
Questioning the gods is blasphemy, but the gods are not what they seem. And an ancient force that plagued humanity thousands of years ago has returned from the depths of space. Jez must persuade the priests to abandon their beliefs and confront reality in order to save hundreds of worlds from destruction.
Status: First draft started.
How the novels started
My first published novel, Ghosts of Innocence, was actually my second novel attempt. My first writing was set on a ring world, similar to Larry Niven’s world but a far future take on our own solar system where the planets and asteroids have been swept up to form a ring affording practically unlimited living space. I enjoyed the writing process, and eventually realized I needed to get independent pairs of eyes on my work. Feedback on the writing itself was positive, but a common complaint was the lack of tension, of action. Basically, everything was too rosy and I had difficulty putting my characters through the wringer.
After a frustrating time trying to introduce conflict, I decided to start over with action and conflict built in from the outset. I pictured a crashing starship, and Ghosts was born.
Ghosts was originally simply a standalone story, but the opening scene for The Ashes of Home, an assassination attempt, popped into my mind and I realized I could continue Shayla’s story. It was a couple of years later that I decided to backtrack and flesh out the events that led up to Ghosts, and Wrath of Empire was born. I do have an outline idea for a follow-up to Ashes but no plans yet to develop it properly.
The Shayla Carver stories mostly originated from images of action. In between times I’ve written other standalone stories that have largely sprouted from the setting.
Tiamat’s Nest was a bit of a rant about climate change and the dangers of willful misinformation, something we’ve seen all too much of in recent years. The novel now feels a bit like premonition, as it was published in 2015 and started nearly six years prior to that.
The Long Dark stemmed from a wish to set a story on a world with a ninety-degree axial tilt and corresponding seasonal extremes.
The Videshi Dilemma, came from wanting to explore interactions with a species who think radically differently from us.
These last two are the only ones so far that feature alien life. I shy away from anthropomorphic aliens—little more than humans in different body plans—and look for ways in which life might have evolved along very different paths.
Unbeliever came about from wanting to explore the stupidity in blindly following dogma, and the importance of critical thinking. It also features an alien form of life that stretches the very concept of life as we recognize it.
The writing process
All my novels so far have started life as a single snapshot, either a visual image, an action scene, or a concept. Sometimes this image forms the start of the story, sometimes it’s a snapshot from some way in and I have to figure out how we get there.
Finding that path from beginning to end tends to be a tortuous and uncertain process for me. Writers often talk about ‘planners’ and ‘pantsers’—those who plan out the course of the novel ahead of time, and those who just sit down and write, letting the story evolve as they go. In reality, most writers are a bit of both rather than sitting at an extreme.
In many contexts I’m normally a big-picture person, so you’d think I’d be a natural planner. When it comes to writing I do usually have fragments of the overall plan, but I need to write scenes before I can figure out the finer details. I tend to flip back and forth, writing to see where it leads me, then sorting out how to fit the pieces into the plan. Even when I plan out the later stages, the eventual story always ends up a long way away from where I thought it would go.
Ian S. Bott, Writer and artist 