Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels.
In addition, now and again I will provide some of my fiction to read, for free, on this newsletter. Everything is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for the newsletter by upgrading to paid.
Daily Diary, , Day 1464:
This is part two of the posts on the origins of the short story Aelwyd. If you wish to read the first part, here is the link.
First of all, I think it would be useful to remind those of you who have read any of the books in the Paradisi Chronicles (or those of you who really don’t have a clue about the story line) the basic history of what we authors who wrote in this open source, shared world called the Paradisi Project. Here is the introduction I wrote for Between Mountain and Sea:
Introduction:
In the early decades of the twenty-first century, the problems of climate change, epidemics, civil war, cyber terrorism, and nuclear proliferation have set Earth on a path of escalating disasters.
In the year 2025 AD, ten men and women come together to address these problems. These individuals each have enormous personal wealth that they made in a variety of commercial enterprises around the globe. What they have in common besides their great wealth is a deep pessimism about the future of Earth and an enormous optimism about space exploration as the only viable solution for the continuation of human kind. To that end, these men and women, who call themselves the Founders, begin the Paradisi Project.
The purpose of the Paradisi Project is the colonization of New Eden, a recently discovered planet in the Andromeda Galaxy that scientists deem capable of sustaining human life. The Paradisi Project harnesses the best minds on Earth to develop the scientific breakthroughs in intersteller travel and wormhole technology needed to transport the ten Founding Families to establish a viable colony on New Eden. Once there, their mission will be to ensure that this new colony doesn’t make the same mistakes that are destroying Earth.
By 2092 AD, the Paradisi Project has achieved its goals. With Earth continuing on its path to destruction, a fleet of ten ships are launched, each carrying 10,000 passengers––Founding Family members, their loyal employees, and the staff necessary to build a new civilization once their journey ends. They leave the SS Challenge, the 11th ship and the prototype for the rest of the Nautilus Fleet, behind to be retrofitted for the long journey. The Reachers, employees of the Reach Corporation, have been promised passage on this ship as a reward for their role building the space elevators, stations, and ships that made the Paradisi Project possible, but when the time comes for their journey to New Eden, they face nothing but betrayal.
Between Mountain and Sea (Caelestis Series Book 1) features Mabel Yu, one of the Founders who made the journey to New Eden, and her descendent, Mei Lin Yu, who, in 165 AA (After Arrival), comes to live at Mynyddamore, the ancestral home that Mabel Yu built in the first years of settlement.
After publishing Between Mountain and Sea, when I needed to write a short story for a potential anthology of stories in this worlds, I wanted to set it in the very first year of settlement on New Eden, in the first base camp set up by the Yu Founding Family on the site of what would later become the capital city of both the Yu nation of Caelestis, as well as the seat of New Eden planet-wide government.
However, I decided I didn’t want Mabel Yu to be the main character in this short story, but I did want the protagonist to have some connection to Mabel Yu.
And that is how I came up with the character of Kammie Gunther, who had come up several times in Between Mountain and Sea. All I really knew about Kammie at this point was that she was a young friend of Mabel’s who had traveled to New Eden on the Yu ship, the SS Nightingale, but that she wasn’t a member of the Yu family herself.
In Between Mountain and Sea, the reader hears from Mabel in a series of diary entries at the beginning of each chapter, which are written as if they are letters to a boy named Jaxon. To give you an idea what I had to work from as I started the short story, I am giving you some excerpts from those diaries for where Kammie was mentioned.
This is the first mention of Kammie in the diary, and it comes when Mabel is still on the Nautilus space station waiting for the ten ships to leave on their long journey to New Eden. All the quotes come from Between Mountain and Sea.
Mabel Yu’s Diary: Two Months to Launch, Earth 2092 AD
I can’t believe they are letting you get away with not having any classroom instruction. Lucky boy. I don’t know why they are bothering with the rest of us. Most of what we are learning is still part of the pre-university curriculum, and there aren’t going to be any universities to attend on New Eden, not for years and years. By the time they get any sort of higher educational system up and running, I’ll be too old to go.
Besides that, there are just too many kids, not enough room, or supervision. Fights are breaking out. Some of the new arrivals are stealing. Stupid things like hand cream and toothpaste and towels…things that you can just get out of requisitions if you need them. Makes me sad to think how they’ve been living.
But Kammie lost the controller to her virtual gamer that her mom gave her for her birthday, and I can’t find my butterfly pin, although living all crammed up in Auntie Lie’s like we’re doing, who knows what happened to it.
The next entry comes right after arrival on the planet. Mabel had been in cryo-statsis for the entire two-year trip, but her friend Kammie had been awake for most of that time.
Mabel Yu’s Diary: New Eden, May 15, 1 AA (After Arrival)
Dear Jaxon,
We are here. But I am glad you aren’t going to read this until you get to New Eden. I wouldn’t be able to be honest, otherwise.
The truth is, I don’t think a lot of people would have come if they’d known how bad the journey would be. I didn’t have a difficult time of it, but I was one of the lucky ones. I went under stasis quickly, and, as advertised, when I woke up it was as if I had just been asleep for a few minutes. I do feel like I’ve been in micro gravity for months because my muscles are so weak it’s hard to stand upright, much less move. But compared to others, I can’t complain.
The conditions on Earth have been bad for so long that those of us living on the Nautilus could ignore the high death rate for everyone else in the world. Not so easy to ignore how many people didn’t make it through cryosleep on the SS Nightingale.
No one is admitting anything officially. And since the Commanders are sticking to the plan of waking us up in batches when they are ready for us to go down to the planet, it’s hard to tell who is missing because they might already be planet side or just haven’t been woken up yet. But I know Auntie Lei didn’t make it…and neither did Walter’s parents.
All the crew—but especially the med techs—look terrible, like they haven’t slept for the entire two years of the journey.
Kammie, whose mom is one of those techs, told me that the first six months it took to get to the Sideris Station at Jupiter wasn’t bad. There were a few emergencies where they had to bring someone out early because of previously undetected medical problems, but only a couple of deaths—including my Auntie Lie, who died of a massive heart attack.
My mother said it turns out the only reason Auntie Lei was permitted to come on the journey, despite her bad health, was because she was married to one of my Yu uncles. No wonder she was scared about going into cryosleep.
But Kammie said the jump through the wormhole caused the biggest problems. Monitors were going off everywhere, and the medical staff had trouble responding. Her mother told her it was like trying to operate with a very high fever, plus there were too many people having problems at the same time for the staff to handle the crisis adequately, even if they’d been functioning at their full capacity.
Then the med staff decided that they needed to wake up those people who showed an unusual degree of stress during the crisis but had survived. That caused even more problems, because some of the ones they woke up started showing PTS syndrome, and they had to wake up everyone with some psychological training to deal with this.
Eventually, they were able to find some genetic markers for those who were most at risk in cryostasis, and they began to wake them up as well. But Kammie, who was one of the ones woken up early, said that there were rumors that not all the decisions on who to let stay awake for the rest of the journey were purely medical, and this is causing bad feelings. Rumor was that Yus got priority.
Making everything even worse, all these people who weren’t in cryosleep put a terrible strain on the ship’s food resources for the last year of the trip. That’s why my mom is anxious to get to work on setting up a lab down on New Eden where she can start testing food sources. Everyone is very tired of the tight rations.
We are scheduled to go down to a camp tomorrow. Anything will be better than staggering around my parents’ tiny quarters on the ship and waiting for more bad news about who didn’t survive.
These following two entries were crucial in helping me develop the plot of the story, because this is where I had established that Kammie had some contact with the natives of the planet. Again, these entries are very early on, years 2 and 3 since arrival.
Mabel Yu’s Diary: New Eden, February 28, 2 AA
One thing that’s been nice is that Kammie Gunther’s mother got permission from the head of her family to continue to work for the Yus, so they are now living down here in New Hong Kong. Great to have someone to talk to who isn’t a Yu.
I know you always thought she was rather dim. But turns out she was just shy. You wouldn’t believe how much the trip changed her. She almost died during the cryosleep crisis, then she had to cope with the year of rationing on board, while watching her mother practically work herself to death. Now she’s amazingly fearless. She even volunteered to go out with the medical team that is trying to make contact with the natives in the hills who are sick. You wouldn’t recognize her.
Mabel Yu’s Diary: New Eden, September 2, 3 AA
Kammie has been spending more and more time in the hills with the local people—she says they call themselves Ddaerans since their name for this planet is Ddaera. She says these Ddaerans have the ability to communicate telepathically with each other. And that they even can speak to and understand some animals. No one believes her. But she says that she met one older woman who the Ddaerans believe can talk with people over vast distances.
I wish that were true…I would ask her to try to find you.
I will start publishing Aelwyd, scene by scene, in the newsletter next week, and as you start to read the story, you should notice how I built on the mention of Kammie having contact with the natives, as well as the existence of telepathy, not just between people, but also between people and animals. And a reminder, you can always just buy the story as a 99 cent ebook or $1.99 audiobook if you can’t wait!
If you enjoy my daily posts and would like to subscribe for free or become a patron (where you will get the pleasure of giving me the resources to spend more time writing and less time marketing) click the little button below. In addition, please do click on the heart so I know you’ve been to visit and/or share with your friends, and I always welcome comments! Thanks!
I’m really enjoying getting into the Paradisi stories!
Great suspense!