I sketched out The Empty House in 2015. It’s a rather ambitious book, an experiment to see if I could write stories like Lovecraft’s gothic cosmic horror, but in Shirley Jackson’s much more subdued style. She wrote The Haunting of Hill House, which is truly scary, though there is no violence or bloodshed. The original movie, The Haunting, is excellent. The remake is garbage.

I started with a list of sixty seven linked but semi-independent stories, and I tried to finish each one before going on to the next. But after nine stories — notes, sketch, rough, first draft, second, ‘third’, and reading aloud once — I got tired, so I put it aside to work on other things for a while, so that I could come back refreshed.

Which I did in 2018. I developed more of the stories, but this time I didn’t try to finish each one. I wrote extended notes, detailed sketches, roughs, first drafts, and so on. This was a lot more productive than before, but by the end of the year I was tired again, so I started working on another project. Then another, and another …

Finally, in May of this year (2023), I got back to The Empty House, and spent over two months of intense work on those stories which were less finished. I brought each of them up a level — from sketch to rough, from rough to first, and so on. That kind of work takes a lot of focused concentration, which is exhausting, despite great satisfaction — as anybody who does original creative work of any kind will understand. And at my age, I’m lucky if I get four or five creative hours a day. 

Many of the stories toward the end had only titles and a single-line note of what the story should be about. The last six stories had neither title nor note, just what characters were involved. When I had first created this list of stories, I had left those all but blank, knowing that when I came to them I would have a better idea of how to get to the ending that I wanted. Those last six stories, taken together, would be about how the evil in the house would at last be vanquished. 

When I got to those ending stories, I was able to write sketches without being handicapped by what I might have written eight years ago, which would have been completely wrong, after all that I had written since then. (I know some writers who can’t free themselves from an outline or a sketch, and can’t let the story lead them in its own direction. I actually heard one writer say that she hated outlines, because then she was forced to follow them.) 

I reached the point where I needed another break, so that I could see the book with fresh eyes. I decided that this time the break would be for only two weeks.

I learned how to use a graphic application for designing settings for D&D table-top games. I have a first edition, second printing of the original D&D boxed set, signed by Dave Arneson, but I had been designing settings for underground adventures for many years before D&D came out. 

My graphics application has a not-too-steep learning curve, but it took intense concentration and focus (of a different kind from writing fiction) in order to create a ‘draft’ of something that might actually be used in a table-top game, and it wasn’t always easy to figure out how to make the application do things the way I wanted it to, instead of in the way for which it had been designed. I have certainly done that before. Doing this drove The Empty House so far into the back of my mind that I wasn’t even aware of it any more. Which was just what I wanted. 

I finished what I had set out to do with Dungeonfog and put it aside. It was the perfect distraction from the very different problems of The Empty House with its sixty seven stories, and I started working on it again, looking forward to exploring the nightmares in that empty house, and making them work. 

It was going well, until I discovered that my email client wouldn’t let me send anything. I still receive emails, but I can’t reply. It took me three days searching on line to discover that it wasn’t my fault, but that my provider, without letting anybody know, had decided to not support email any more. Since then it’s been a nightmare of a different sort, trying to contact about four hundred websites that require passwords, trying to let something like five hundred fifty friends know that I have a new address. I did discover that hundreds of these could be scratched off my lists. There’s still some clean-up to do, but three weeks of this business is more than too much.

Do I sound just a bit miffed? Hmm. I wonder why (he said sarcastically). But last week I finally got back to The Empty House. 

And it was as if I had never been away.

This post was supposed to have been uploaded on June 4, but though I wrote it, edited it, and started the new post, somewhere along the way I failed to take a critical step, and it never appeared. I’ve edited it slightly to be more in tune with the late upload.

The promotion for Slaves of War started on May 2, 2023 and ran through May 5. When I checked on the results on May 27, I found that 2,487 people had visited my Amazon page, and 1,580 orders had been processed, including the free books offered during the promotion. It’s hard to get precise numbers, but by dividing my estimated royalties by the actual price of the books, I may have sold six copies.

If I were to try doing this again, it wouldn’t take so long to learn how, but the promotion service refuses submissions which have too many errors or typos. Though I edit my work quite thoroughly (I have read professionally edited books published by standard publishers which have typos and homonym errors), I still would need to use text to speech to find anything I had missed, and that could take a week or two, or a lot more, if it’s something as long as Dead Hand (160,000 words, 350 pages).

As of June 3, no books were actually sold, and none since then.

I have continued working on The Empty House, which I posted about previously, a Lovecraftian cosmic gothic horror as if written by Shirley Jackson. It consists of sixty seven semi-independent stories, each climaxing with a moment of horror only implied, or the realization of some equally horrific truth. 

Some of the stories which I had already worked on were in first draft form, others in rough draft, some were well-developed sketches, others were brief sketches, some were preliminary text, many were just two or three lines of what the story would be about. Some had no story lines, and some did not even have titles. But they were on my story list for reasons which were clear to me in 2015. I had to trust myself.

I started at the beginning, taking each story to the next level, instead of trying to do a full final draft all at once of each one. The pause until I get back to those stories will let me see them fresh, and I’ll understand more about what needs to be developed or tightened or even changed. I did two good if brief sketches, a day or so ago, when the story idea lines told me only a person and a place. Doing those sketches was pretty good for starting from almost nothing. I have done full roughs, extended sketches, and brief sketches some of those stories for which I had no information. It’s going well, but will still take some time.

Three years ago, a friend of mine whom I see only once a year, told me about how he promoted his self-published books, by using an on-line service. It seemed, from what he told me, to be a rather complicated process, so instead of trying to learn how it worked, I chose to spend my time writing instead. Two years ago he encouraged me again but, being in the middle of a writing project, I did nothing. Last year we sat down, and he spent almost an hour telling me about the promo services (there are several), about which one he used, and how it worked for him. When I looked him up on line, I saw that he had, indeed, sold a decent number of books. 

This year I decided, that when I took a break between finishing Turning Point and getting back to The Empty House (which I had left unfinished in 2015), I would finally do what my friend had been encouraging me to do.

It was, in fact, rather more complicated than I liked. It took me almost three weeks to figure out how to do it, and to prepare Slaves of War for a second edition (since it had far too many typos that I had somehow missed), which would be my test of the service, rather than starting with The Black Ring, as my friend had wanted me to do.

I got an email from the service when the promotion was supposed to have begun, telling me that I had failed to do something even though I remembered having done it, and that the promotion would not take place. (I suspect that I had not clicked a critical button, which has been a problem of mine in the past.) I tried again, and it seems that I have corrected the mistake. I am now waiting for a report, which should come in a few days. If it doesn’t work this time, I’ll explain what happened to my friend, and tell him that I don’t have enough spare time to try it again.

Meanwhile, I have gone back to The Empty House. It’s a long series of connected stories, which take place from 1869 through 1926. It is Lovecraftian gothic horror, not written in his sometimes rather purple prose, but more like Shirley Jackson’s very understated style (she wrote The Haunting of Hill House). It’s going to take a while.

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.

I finished what I call a ‘third draft’ of Star Kings, and I’ve been getting it ready for publication.This has taken much longer than I had hoped. I read through it one more time for obvious typos, errors, and weaknesses. I then read it aloud for text, flow, and readability, and fixed more typos, doubled or missing words, wrong choice of words, bad phrasing, sentences or paragraphs which were out of place, and other things. I used a text-to-speech reader which revealed a few more problems, which I had not seen in all the drafts and edits until then. It took that much polish to meet the standards which I have set for myself. 

Formatting did not take as long as I had feared. Most of the things I fixed were widows and orphans, that is, when only the first line of a paragraph is at the bottom of a page, or the last line is at the top. I also fixed paragraphs when the last line was only one word that was fewer than five letters, or was the last part of a hyphenated word. I wasn’t so minutely picky this time about line spacing and kerning, but it still took a couple days. I may do a post on formatting later. 

I created the front-matter, which includes title pages, also-by’s, copyright notices, and so on. I added three appendices; for Characters (to remind readers who they were without me having to repeat it), for Other Peoples (those non-humans on other worlds, so I didn’t have to describe them every time), and a Brief Glossary, for terms which I had made up, and for words which had a special meaning in the story. That didn’t take very long either.

I began the process of submitting the book to the company which is my printer/binder. The first thing they want is the title, which can’t be changed later. That’s when I discovered that Star Kings was the title of a book published by Edmond Hamilton in 1947, so I couldn’t use it, and had to come up with something different. It feels strange to say it, but it took me three days, and dozens of bad ideas, before I finally settled on Turning Point. It’s appropriate, because the story is full of turning points, which are events or decisions or discoveries which change the way the story will go and what will follow.

Then I needed a blurb, which is the text that is on the back cover of the book. I did that in a day. Then I needed a description, which is what you see on the bookseller’s web page when you look for it on-line. I wound up doing seven versions, each with many drafts, until I finally got one which satisfied my unofficial but highly competent editor.

Now I’m ready to go. 

Except for the cover picture …

It has taken longer than I had hoped to finish reading Star Kings aloud; for text, for story/content, for performance. Weather, health, family obligations, other interruptions to my so limited creative time.  But the reading is done, and now I will do a text-to-speech. 

It has been recommended several times that the writer have someone read the story aloud, to catch things the writer would not otherwise see. That might work for short fiction, but finding someone to read Star Kings for me would be a bit of problem. The text is something over 137,000 words, nobody I know has that kind of time, and I haven’t found any way to hire someone to read aloud for me, all in one go, and I’m not sure I would like it anyway. I have used text-to-speech software, and it works. Despite all the times I’ve read the manuscript (typescript?) it still finds lots of little errors that I’ve missed.

It has also been suggested that I hire a professional freelance editor. That is way beyond my budget, at about $40 per hour, at about ten pages per hour, at about 550 pages, given a standard 250 words per page. That’s $2,200. Not counting how long it would actually take. Not counting how well the editor might understand what I’ve done. I’ve had editors make egregious assumptions, and make totally unacceptable “corrections.” Story on request.

I find characters easy. They all live in my head, as it were, and I come to know them as I write. But description, narration, and sometimes even flow of plot are hard for me. It’s the problems with those aspects which I find while reading, silent or aloud, that must be fixed. So, aside from my apparent talent with characters and dialogue, everything else is an acquired skill, and what needs to be fixed takes a long time.

The standards which I have set for myself have become higher than they were even ten years ago. I do not judge other writers by my standards. There really is no comparison. My standards concern my use of my acquired skills, which standards I apply to whatever irregularities I find. I am not aware of these irregularities until I read my story aloud, maybe for a third or fourth time.

Getting it right is important to me. There are lots of times when I find a tiny glitch in what I’ve written, and I’m tempted to say, “Ah, it’s good enough.” Then I read it again. And then I decide to fix it. Maybe I’m obsessed with it, but “good enough” isn’t good enough. It has to be right, or at least as good as I can make it.

After this comes formatting. Sigh.

When I started writing full time, the received wisdom was, that if you wanted to be successful, you should write one thousand words a day. 

I had, and still have, a problem with that: was it one thousand words of sketches and notes? a rough draft? a polished draft? If I wrote one thousand words of first draft and, the next day, revised and corrected it, did that count? If I cut and tightened it so that it became only eight hundred words, did that mean I had done minus two hundred words? The dictum was never really explained.

I don’t know how long it took Thomas Wolfe to write Look Homeward Angel, but according to the biography of Maxwell Perkins, who was Wolfe’s editor, it took Perkins five years of working with Wolfe to get it into publishable shape. I don’t know how many words that comes down to from start to finish, but it is not a thousand a day. Even without all that editing.

Ernest Hemingway edited his own work extensively before submitting it, polishing his style to be exactly the way he wanted it to be. 

I don’t know how long it took Margaret Mitchel to write Gone With the Wind, but I’m sure she didn’t just dash it off at a thousand words a day. 

It took Truman Capote about five years to research In Cold Blood. 

Tolkien took sixteen years to write The Lord of the Rings. 

So much for a thousand words a day.

I have written a thousand words a day, but they were first draft. I wrote Planet Masters, 75,000 words, in eight and a half days, nearly ten thousand words a day. I also did sketches, maps, characters, created the world’s complex culture. Then revisions, corrections, and responding to my editor’s comments. I wrote The Pursuit of Diana in fifteen days, because I had to. Plus dealing with my editor’s comments. 

But I still wonder sometimes, am I taking too long with Star Kings? Aside from the years between when I started it and when I picked it up again.

I finished what I call a good third draft of Star Kings, and read aloud for text, and finished, after thirteen months, on September 9, 2022, when I took a “much needed break.” I got back to Star Kings on October 20, read it aloud again, and now I’m working on reading for story, that is, does it flow? does it make sense? is there anything which might kick a reader out of the story? 

Yes, there is. There are continuity problems, such as when a description of something in one place is different from what it is in another. There were several paragraphs where the text was fine, but I had no idea what I had been talking about, what it meant. That took almost two hours to fix. If I hadn’t fixed it, someone else might just have stopped reading. 

And because of the length and complexity of the story, about 136,000 words at this point, I decided to create an appendix for a list of characters, instead of having to remind the reader if that character hadn’t shown up for a while. 

My viewpoint character interacts with many peoples who aren’t human in any way. They have their own home worlds, biologies, physiologies, and so on. So I am adding an appendix describing each of them, so that, for example, when I mention the Mroghan people, say eleven chapters after the last time, I don’t have to describe them again. 

And there are lots of terms, the meanings of which are clear in the context of the story, but when they are used many chapters later the reader might forget. 

For example, when I wrote Stroad’s Cross, which took place in 1958, I didn’t have to put in a description or explanation of what a “stick shift” was. I’m sure there are people today who have no idea. In Star Kings, a reader might not remember what I meant by “tablet” when I use it so infrequently. My characters would just know that, and would not have to remind themselves.

Doing all this takes time, and I have only three or four good creative hours a day. But it still nags at me, am I taking too long, am I being too careful?

After re-reading my first paragraphs, maybe not. And besides, the standards which I have set for myself have become higher than they were even ten years ago. 

I do not judge other writers by the standards I have set — or am setting — for myself. Every writer is different, so that is not really possible anyway.

It is that, as I have grown as a writer (storyteller), I have become more aware of my weaknesses and faults, and I am no longer content to say, “well, it’s good enough,” when I can in fact do better if I just try. Which takes time, and energy, which is in ever diminishing supply. And there’s no way I could write one thousand finished words a day.

I started working on Star Kings a long time ago. I wanted to write a series of stories set in the far future, stories that I would like as much as those which I had written for Freefoot. I did a lot of preparation — character names, personalities, descriptions. Plot-points, obstacles and conflicts, adventures and challenges, and so on. It went nowhere. I still have the folder and file cards.

 I finally realized, years later, that what had worked for Freefoot, was that the stories were about peaceful times in a safe world, with ordinary Elfquest people, living normal lives, with only occasional unexpected events, which gave the reasons for the stories. My work on Star Kings had not been like that. It was only dangers, adventures, conflicts, and enemies. 

So, informed by what I had done in my Elfquest stories, I started working on Star Kings again, on December 8, 2017. I did sketches and rough drafts of the first five parts, and they worked. The people were ordinary in their own way, in a far future, living in a giant city between the stars. They were miners, extracting bizarre molecules from cold stars and creating exotic materials. They were traders, going to other worlds and trading those materials for what they wanted, and for other things to trade with other worlds. Most of them lived like ordinary people in their city, with services, shops, schools, and so on. 

It was going to be a huge project, from the birth of my hero to the birth of his first child. I decided to put it aside for a while, so that I could work on some other ideas. I wrote and published A Thing Forgotten, and The Gift and the Price. I got back to Star Kings on August 20, 2021, sketched the next four parts, and wrote drafts of the whole thing, part by part, until I had something that was not quite ready for publication, on September 9, 2022.

I still had to polish it by reading it aloud, but I had been working on it for thirteen months, and I was tired. I had to just stop for a while and take a break. My normal breaks between projects were usually from half a day to a weekend, but I needed something much longer than that, so that I could have a clear mind and a fresh view when I got to the polishing. 

Second to storytelling, what I enjoy most is graphic art. I have a variety of graphics applications, which I haven’t used much because of that storytelling, and there were some things I wanted to create visually, instead of verbally, so that was what I did. I really enjoyed doing it. It uses a different kind of imagination — no words. I learned more about how to use the software. I created a fantasy map with Sketchbook, and I’m working on a flickership from Star Kings using Graphic (a generic name), and used Graphic for a street map of a tiny town. I really like making street maps, and maps of strange lands. I like making house plans, which I can sometimes use in my stories.. And designing castles, and dungeons, and starships…. I want to do something with 3D graphics, but that will have to wait. 

I returned to Star Kings on October 10, 2022, and started reading aloud for text. Next I’ll read aloud for story, and then for performance. Then comes the formatting, getting the cover art (Darcy will do that), and I may finish before Christmas this year. I am refreshed, and doing well, and as I read Star Kings aloud, I get chills. It’s becoming what I want it to be.

And that is why I took the long break, to really stop, for a month, not half a day. It’s done me a lot of good.

I had an opportunity to write some non-fiction in the early part of my career, and since my stories weren’t doing very well, I decided to take the chance. I wrote about computers at a time when I could learn a lot, more than the average reader, just by studying the ads in Byte magazine. Then write what I had learned in language that even I could understand. I wrote a few books, collaborated on one, updated part of a textbook, wrote some articles, and was a contributing editor for a couple magazines. But computers went beyond my limited expertise and, though my writing skills were still in demand, and I decided to stop and focus on my fiction again. I was happier with that. 

I was approached some years later by a high school junior who, like others in her class, had to find a mentor who could help her understand the kind of work she might do after college. Kristin thought about being an editor, her parents knew about me being a writer, so they suggested that she come to me. 

We met every couple weeks to talk about what an editor does, and I suggested that she take a look at the first few chapters of Stroad’s Cross, which had been rejected several times, to see if she could tell me what she thought I need to do to make it better. When we met again a couple weeks later, she told me that she hadn’t been able to read very much of it. I asked her to explain, as that might help me understand how I could revise it. None of the rejecting editors had told me anything, even the one who had taken two years to reply.

She showed me the pages she had marked, and told me that she hadn’t gone any further because it was boring. That is probably the worst critical comment writers can hear about their work.

She told me that there was too much detail. I had spent a lot of time working on that detail. I looked at the pages she had marked, she explained what the red comments meant, and she was right. My characters, if they were caught up in the story, wouldn’t pay any attention to most of the details I had put in, only to those which furthered the story. I thanked her, told her I would look at it later, and we talked about other things.

Her red-ink comments, and what she had told me, let me know what I could do with the manuscript. I cut it by about twenty percent on the first pass, by taking out a lot of the description which none of my characters would notice, and which my readers didn’t need. The story, not just the text, was greatly improved. I went through it again, with a better understanding of what needed to be done, and the story got better. I gave Kristin credit in the front matter. Some of my fans have told me that it’s their favorite. 

It was only within the last year or so, while I was reading an article in The Smithsonian, that I finally realized why I had written Stroad’s Cross that way. I had been using using the style I had learned for writing non-fiction. It’s the way most articles are written in The Smithsonian. I can provide that level of detail if it is needed for clarity, and leave it out if it’s not. 

What I want, is for my readers to get into the story, until they can almost experience it the way my characters do. When I’m reading fiction, I read slowly, in real time — most people probably don’t read stories this way — and I can almost see the settings, and what I think the characters look like. I can hear the dialogue, the tones of voice, the difference between one speaker and another. I can, in my imagination, feel what the hands touch or what touches the skin, smell what the character smells, and be, sometimes, inside the character’s head, so that I am aware of their thoughts or emotions without being told.

But I can’t have that experience if the text is like this: “He opened the door to a living room. A large red sofa, a bit ragged, was on the right, under a picture window that let in early morning light, slightly dimmed by a thin overcast. On the left were two large overstuffed chairs, both older than the sofa, one blue, one green plaid, with a small table between them. There was a coffee table in middle of the room, with a glass ashtray, an empty coffee cup, and several sheets of paper. In the far left corner …” The description goes on for another two hundred words or more, before ‘he’ (we eventually learn his name) goes in and does something. I can see a lot, but what does all that description do for me? 

The problem with Stroad’s Cross was that I was telling what was there, not showing what my character saw; telling what the details were, not showing those that the character noticed. The above example could be rewritten in fifty words, including name, movement, and smell, which is important, not in the two hundred fifty or more which a full description would require. If my readers want a story, they don’t want a magazine article about the details of the houses, rooms, forest, and so on. At least I don’t think so. Kristin certainly didn’t want that.

Sometimes telling is better, even in a story. It depends on the context, and what I’m trying to do. I wrote this essay with lots of telling in early drafts, when I was capturing my ideas. It has taken me a long time to come to this final version. But when I’m writing a story, of whatever length, I am just transcribing what is in my head, and many drafts follow before I can get it right, so that I can read it as if I were in the story. 

And when I’ve done that, I hope that my readers will be in it with me.

Creation can take a lot of energy. Sometimes the words just flow, and it seems to be so easy. Then I stop after a few hours or so, and realize how tired I’ve become.

Creating a new story is relatively easy for me, if the setting is similar to a place I know, the house is similar to one I have lived in, the characters are similar to any of people I have met in the real world, and if the story is a new take on one of the basic plots. (Different critics disagree on how many basic plots there are.) Every old plot that is reused becomes a different story. After all, “how the detective learned who killed whats-his-name” is an ancient plot, but no two stories are the same.

But when everything is new — setting, situation, characters, background — then writing a new story takes a lot more creative energy. 

Star Kings (working title) is the most demanding book I’ve ever worked on, far more effort per page than even The Black Ring. It’s a story cycle, from the hero’s birth to the birth of his first child. It is set in a galaxy so far away that George Lucas never heard of it, and in a time that bears no relation to any time with which we are familiar. It involves a highly advanced people who have come to share the Cold Star Cluster, deep in the Great Cloud, with twenty five other intelligent peoples among hundreds of star systems. These other peoples are not the aliens, my heroes are the outsiders. My people trade with many of these other peoples, and with hundreds of other peoples out in the limb of the galaxy beyond the Cloud. 

Each of these peoples is different, in biology, physiology, appearance, technology level, psychology, culture, and so on. I can only hint at those differences, and I don’t have to do more than that, unless a difference affects the development of the story, and then tell no more than what is necessary. The peoples cannot be actors in rubber suits. They have to feel like real people, even though they are not “human.” 

My hero and his people are not “human” either, I just portray them that way to make it easier to tell my stories. They live in what they call the city, a giant construct in space near the center of the Cluster. It is complex, enclosed, an artificial environment with different gravitational zones. Life in the city is not like the life we know here.  

I use what I know of our world as models for what my Star Kings do in the city, how they live at home, how they trade with others in the Cluster and out in the limb of the galaxy, and where they get their wealth. My models here are obvious. Mining towns mine for a living, no matter when or where. They are supported by people who provide shops, government, community, just like any small town does. Traders trade, they are not merchants buying and selling. There is no common currency between, say, medieval Cornwall, the Italian states, or the far East. And some of the cultures I portray also have models in the real world.

The worlds I visit (if they have people, I call them ‘worlds’, otherwise I call them ‘planets’) are not like our world, and each of them must be different, at least in some small way. I describe only their obvious differences from our world, rather than giving a full description of their land forms, their botany, their styles of architecture, and so on. I try to suggest, instead show. 

—————

Each of the forty one stories is a challenge. The plot of each story must make sense, it must have a beginning that hooks the reader, an ending that is satisfying and makes the reader want another story, and a middle that draws the reader from the beginning to the end. This is, of course, what every story should have. But for the stories of Star Kings, each setting, situation, problems to be solved, and cast of characters — except for a few who continue from story to story — has to be created from scratch. If any of this is used in a later story, the reader may need to be reminded about it, if only briefly. 

Continuity is a problem. Have I said or done or shown something before? Did I provide a necessary set-up more than once? Did I use the same plot device in different stories? Has the passage of time been consistent? It takes a lot of effort to check all this, but it must be done. Readers catch mistakes in things like that. 

Every story I finish shows how my heroes grow, and helps me to understand them better. My understanding of what their life is like in their artificial world, as miners and what they mine, as traders dealing with other peoples, of their culture, of the society of the Cluster, and of the greater society of the peoples of the limb beyond it, all that grows too.

Sturgis, which I published in 2016, had just one recognizable town, several recognizable characters, and only a vampire who was different. It was based on Stoker’s book, not the movies, and it was easy.

Star Kings, well, that continues to be difficult, and it is taking a lot of time. And yet, as I finish each story, I get chills, a sign that I have done well. I don’t know what it will feel like when I finish the whole cycle.