I have finally finished the book which I used to call Star Kings, and changed the title when I found that Edmond Hamilton used it in 1949. Look it up. My book is now Turning Point. 

The last thing I needed was a cover. My artist has a regular job, and was not well for a while, and there were other things happening which had higher priority, so it took her longer than she had expected to get to it. Just in case, so that I wouldn’t have to delay publication for too long, I made a cover of my own, which I rather like. But it is not in the same style that my artist has used for my other covers, and which has become a kind of brand. The cover she did for me does not look at all like mine, and I like it a lot. You can see it on Amazon, or the last Library entry on Allen Wold’s Books.

Turning Point has nine parts, each of which is a long story. There are forty seven chapters altogether, which are almost stories in themselves. I work from sketches, not outlines, and let the story develop as it will. I had an idea about how each part and chapter would begin, and I knew what was supposed to be accomplished at the end, but I did not know how I was going to get there.

I do not write biographies for my characters. They all come from that part of my unconscious which I call my muse, and sometimes they just show up while I’m writing. I get to know them, including my hero, in the same way that I get to know the people whom I have just met, learning more about them each time we meet. I let my characters be who they are, and let them behave according to their nature, and let them deal with whatever is going on around them in their own way. I am constantly surprised by what they can do, and by how they do it. I really enjoy that, even though my hero wasn’t quite what I expected him to be. My characters are not static, they grow as real people do. 

My hero is one of the Vaandae, who are ordinary people in their own life. I learned about their safe and familiar culture as star-miners and galactic traders as I developed it. I learned about what they did at home in their city between the stars, about the non-human peoples with whom they traded in the Cold Star Cluster, and I realized that trading with the worlds and peoples beyond the Great Cloud, out in the limb of the galaxy, was sort of like trading in the Mediterranean when it was the center of the known world. 

As my knowledge of the Vaandae grew, I came to understand that their culture was almost ideal — as I might wish, but only in some ways, that our culture could be. I discovered the over-all arc of the story, and how to bring it to a satisfying conclusion, even as I wrote it. And I realized that every chapter and every part had a turning point, after which things were different; in a character’s life, in the culture of the Vaandae, and in their place in the larger culture of the limb of the galaxy. That was what gave me the title I now use.