The Heart of a Novel

** Spoiler Warning – Lots and Lots of Spoilers **

Two years ago today I self-published my first novel, The Heart of Lightspeed. To me this moment in time is a punctuation mark on twenty years of my life. I’ve told people that writing the book was how I dealt with the stress of the pandemic. This is true. However, it’s also true that I wanted to prove to myself that I could actually write a book from start to finish. There had been so many excuses over the years. There were many and they were often stupid. It’s honestly embarrassing to think of now.

To know the roots of my procrastinations and reluctances you must first understand that The Heart of Lightspeed isn’t about Kieran and the crew of the Leviathan racing to save the galaxy. It’s a final chapter in the long life of Rebecca. She may seem like a mysterious spacefaring adventuring scientist, but before she was ink on paper… Rebecca was a real person.

In high school I had a crush on a girl who inspired the original “Rebecca.” Whenever I needed a strong female character the name would fill space until the story shaped the woman into her own character. With her own name. In time I came to stop using “filler” names when writing, but for some reason Rebecca stuck as the default female name in my rough drafts.

However, in college there was still a lingering memory. Rebecca Chambers became the doomed love interest in a book I spent many years trying to write, Improbable Impossibilities. That story saw the character of Rebecca grow and change until eventually she became an immortal god. The novel never came together beyond an overly long short story that I drafted for a class. Time passed and I gave up on Improbable Impossibilities.

My next idea was a series of books about the many adventures of Rebecca Chambers across the years. Each book would be about someone else, but she would pop up as a side character. There to wink and nod at the reader that something amazing was about to happen, because why else would she be there? You can find hints of this in The Heart of Lightspeed where it’s implied she was involved in historical events.

So why didn’t I write those stories? I kind did. I sketched out almost six books worth of adventures. It got so big and complicated that for a long time I felt like it wasn’t even fit to be a series of novels. It would have to be some sort of digital interactive art piece that scrolled on for hundreds of feet in both directions as you experienced the adventure across time and space.

This is where the rough shape of a sci-fi adventure about saving the galaxy formed. It was meant to be her last adventure. What could be more fitting send off for the life of an immortal woman than saving all of existence? Long before it was ever fully drafted I knew it had three elements: An intense conversation and fight to the death between our hero and a scary robotic foe in the dark, a spaceship that was ridiculously large, and an untested faster than light engine.

However, before it got much further than a rough outline and a first chapter… college ended and with it so did my attempts at writing anything more than a blog post. At the time I had a lot of reasons, but honestly they were all just self-sabotage covering up fear of failing.

Then two things happened:

I met my wife. Love and support is amazing. Everyone should have it.

I got older. The younger version of myself didn’t want to try and fail at being a “professional writer.” The older version of me is okay with never getting published. Just writing for friends, family, and the occasional person who picks up a book from their local “free library” on the corner is enough.

From the ashes the rough idea of The Heart of Lightspeed rose in my mind. I started noodling sketches of what the full story would actually look like on paper. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It just needed one more thing before I could get started.

Covid. Death has always been a great motivator.

I started working on The Heart of Lightspeed in earnest. On an iPad. I wrote all about that adventure here. The time from first word to printing the book went by pretty quickly because I was highly motivated to have a finished product to share with people. I never made any attempts at getting it published because that would have added at least a year to the whole endeavor, and there was no certainly that anyone would want to publish it anyway.

I wanted to finish the book by fall 2021. Not years later.

A rough draft was edited into readable shape with much help from my wife, Marie and my sister, Zoe. When not fixing comma placements or bad sentence flow I made a few story edits along the way as they pointed out plot holes or dialog that didn’t seem right. If you’re curious what got cut or “lost” from those early drafts:

Originally the novel was bookended by a series of emails traded between the Council and Systems Control. This was meant to show the vastness of space and time in the proceedings. However, after Covid showed me the ridiculousness that is a large Zoom call I changed it to a series of real time calls. In the end I think readers enjoyed the final version far more than they would have emails.

In the interest of getting readers to the “fun” faster I cut three chapters that took place after Kieran was scooped up by the Marines. It was a series of hand offs as the Marines moved Kieran from one facility and ship to the next. I do miss how they showed the bureaucracy and largess of the human empire. The final version where they just throw Kieran out the airlock is far superior though.

There was a chapter about the morning after the crew got drunk, told sad stories, and got up to shenanigans. It was about how there can’t really be privacy on a spaceship. It included some somewhat funny jokes at Kieran’s expense and some verbal sparing between Juaana and Rebecca. In the end of the day it just made everything drag before the crew finds out they have to go through the silicon forest.

I once had many more hints and even a subplot about Rebecca’s status as the Mother of Songs. An example of something that survived the edits: At the end when the repo man comments on Mother Goose’s dual FTL engine setup, that was meant to be a tease that Rebecca was already well aware of technology that the Leviathan crew thought they were just discovering for the first time.

There was originally a -much- spicier sex scene between Kieran and Rebecca when they were alone on the ship near the end of the book. Blame Marie for never getting to read that. Something about it being wildly out of tone from the rest of the book.

Now that’s what was cut, but what got added or changed?

Originally the ending was far more ambiguous about whether the crew survived the jump into the anomaly. However, I didn’t want to end on such a dour note. So I borrowed from the movie Contact, and have a line that they only got static on the comms, but it was 154 minutes of static. I felt like this combined with Kieran’s hint that they are seeing something in the past was enough for readers.

The finale with Mother Goose flying away was never in any of the early drafts. I added it after seeing how Kaylee and Rebecca interacted. There was a playfulness there that I hadn’t planned on. So the idea of Kaylee blowing a thief out her airlock felt totally on brand. The new final chapter also allowed me to give readers one final hint that Rebecca and crew had survived.

If I had to do the book over I would probably focus it more. It tries to be too many things: a quiet tale of people struggling on a spaceship journeying into the unknown in one section, a harrowing survival story about trudging through an alien landscape, an intense battle of wits against a robotic foe, a story of two people alone on a spaceship trying to figure out how to co-exist, and finally a brief Oceans-11 style thriller about stealing an experimental ship.

I’m not saying a book couldn’t do all of the above. I’m just not sure I really had the skills at the time to do it. And certainly not in the word count I set for myself. A longer book or fewer story beats would have been better. I mean there’s so many characters! Why did I tackle this as my first novel? I should have done a smaller focused story with fewer characters.

All that said, I do think it’s a fun little read. I’m pretty happy with a few scenes:

When the marines toss Kieran out the airlock and he lands on the Mother Goose.
When the crew is sitting around to celebrate getting the FTL engine working, and they end up talking about the last time they saw their parents. Probably the best written stuff in the book right there.
Kieran facing down the robot in the server room in the dark with the fire all around them. I spent a long time imagining, writing, and refining that final showdown.
Rebecca explaining to Kieran how the perception of time works when you live forever. It gives the emotional weight to why Kieran’s parents committed suicide, and the challenge that Rebecca faces every day by choosing to continue living.

“I see the ducks. Do you see them floating on the ocean? Its beautiful.”

Once the draft was final, I started down the road of self-publishing. For all the things you could say about Amazon, I will give them credit for having clearly written instructions on their publishing process. I had to pull Marie’s old MacBook out of the closet and use it to upload the manuscript to Amazon because their Kindle platform didn’t have a web or iOS option. Only Mac or Windows.

To make the cover art I scoured the free image libraries on the web. There were a couple possibilities, including an actual photo taken from space by someone onboard the space station… but at the end of the day even though I was doing a self-publishing setup I didn’t want to intrude on someone else’s rights. So I used a free image, with some Adobe Photoshop editing, to create the cover you see today. I still love how it came together.

Given the rushed production, lack of marketing on my part, and little I did to promote it after the fact… I’m not dissatisfied with the sales numbers. I made it. People read it. Some even enjoyed it! So much so that they asked when the sequel would come, but there isn’t more.

When you meet Rebecca in The Heart of Lightspeed you are meeting a four thousand year old woman who has realized that she’s come to the end of her adventures. Part of life is that sometimes to reach the next place you have to burn the ships. If you’re not the same person, did you really come back? Can you come back? Sometimes that’s part of the deal you make.

A few final thoughts the characters:

Kieran: I originally wrote him thinly defined not because I didn’t have a backstory for him, but rather because I wanted readers to be able to project themselves onto him. Test readers didn’t like that. Its supposed to be implied by his many decades at the university that he’s been hiding from the “real” world since the death of his parents, and the events of the book are the action that get him moving. Similar to Bilbo Baggins getting that fateful push out the door.

Rebecca: Her many adventures before the book takes place have left her scarred, literally. That thin line she’s etched across her artificial face was purposeful. It’s meant to be her reminder to herself how dangerous the universe is when you let your guard down. So the character is meant to be obtuse and hard to define. Yet other than Kieran and Henry she’s the only character who’s inner voice you really get to hear. Her journey is meant to be one of finally accepting that you cannot control your fate. She finally lets go and opens herself up to loving again, and thus feels safe jumping into the final unknown surrounded by friends.

Henry: There’s not a lot there for him in the book, but he was supposed to be the symbol of regret. Choices not made. Things not said. Angry about his own failures knowing they are his own. Hiding himself inside a shell so unloved that he didn’t even stop to get realistic looking skin 3D printed before he set off on his journey.

Systems Control: I wanted to do an AI that wasn’t evil, that wasn’t trying to take over the world. I liked the idea of AI as a caretaker of humanity and so I tried hard to make it clear that it was never scheming against the humans. However, it’s singular focus on studying the anomaly did have test readers thinking it was up to no good.

Braug: An alien so unlike the humans that they barely seemed to understand him. Not as well done by me was the explanation for why. The Goron’s see time happening all at once. Thus it is very difficult for them to be in any one moment with humans and they come across and slow and dim witted, when in fact they are thinking at speeds far exceeding ours.

Captain Marcus Fillion: I totally based him on Mal from Serenity. He’s flown every odd bit of spaceship that humanity needed flown somewhere they didn’t want to remember. His place in the story is the middle man caught between the various groups jockeying for authority on the Leviathan.

Juaana & Soleio Verantes: I liked the idea of the inventors of the newest faster than light engine being space hippies. That they are not each other’s first and only great love was meant to be a nod to Kieran and Rebecca finding each other despite their vast age differences.

Oriono Upyuka: I wanted to do a non-binary character and the solider fit neatly into that with their original body having been destroyed. What they were before they lost their body isn’t important to them or any of the other characters. They’re just Oriono. That they are completely mechanical and Rebecca seems to not like them was supposed to be an early hint that she wasn’t organic either.

Original Character Notes