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 1462:
Now that I have gotten back to editing and hope finally to finish writing In Ddaera’s Embrace, the fifth and final book in my Caelestis Series, I’ve decided to publish in the newsletter the short story, Aelwyd, that I wrote to be part of that series. I will follow the same pattern I used with the Victorian San Francisco short stories, starting with a couple introductory posts about the origins of this particular story.
This first introductory post will be a variation on posts I have written in several places about how I came to write science fiction at all and the role I played in creating the Paradisi Chronicles an open source, multi-author shared world.
In 2013, Amazon announced that it was created Kindle Worlds (which has since folded) that permitted published authors of already successful series to offer to other authors (for a percentage of the royalties earned) the chance to write what was called fan fiction in a particular series. A prominent indie author at that time, Hugh Howey, (who wrote the very successful independently published series that the Apple+ show Silo is adapted from) wrote a post in 2014 that challenged indie authors to created their own worlds. Immediately a group of independent authors I knew decided to do that very thing, so we got together to create a science fiction world in which we could all write.
While I had only been writing historical mysteries at that point, one of my favorite forms of recreational reading has always been science fiction, and I quickly became invested in this idea, participating with a group of over ten interested authors. We brainstormed on line, starting the collaborative process of deciding the parameters of that world, discussing such questions as: Would it be Earth in the future or another world or multiple worlds? Would there be aliens? Would people have paranormal powers? Did we want a “Men in Black” scenario? Should there be fantasy elements? Would the stories happen in a single time period or range over time?
We voted on the various options, and the most popular was the creation of a solar system (we called Paradisi), in another galaxy with a planet called New Eden that people escaping from a dying Earth. We rejected the idea of fantasy (ie no magic), but we did decide to give the natives of New Eden (or Ddaera as these natives called the planet) psychic abilities that would have some sort of scientific basis. The language we gave the natives was based on Welsh. One of our participating authors writes books set in medieval Wales and suggested it was a language that was obscure enough to sound alien to the colonists coming to New Eden. Those of you who have read my books can understand why, in hindsight, I rather wished we’d not thought ourselves so clever in doing so, since I know readers struggle trying to sound out these words in their minds. They certainly do sound alien, however!
After some of the initial decisions were made, two of the authors, Amanda Allen (who has subsequently become a very successful cozy historical mystery author under the pen name Beth Byers) and Cheri Lasota (who is a successful artist and cover designer as well as having subsequently written a series of novellas in the Paradisi Chronicles universe) and I took what the other authors said they wanted and brainstormed online feverishly over a few days. I was then asked to write up the basic backstory for the Paradisi Chronicles in order to provide a Guide for all the writers.
In retrospect, I had no business spending time trying to build a whole new world in July of 2014, because that was the month I started writing Deadly Proof, the fourth book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. I am not one of those prolific writers who are able to write across multiple genres, producing multiple books, in multiple series, multiple times a year.
In fact, Maids of Misfortune, my first historical mystery, took 20 years between first draft and publication, the next two books each took just short of two years from beginning of research to publication, and I had already spent over a year doing the research for Deadly Proof. Additionally, I had no idea if this whole project was even going to fly, much less bring in revenue.
I told myself that I would just write a short story in this new world I had helped create, something I could do while Deadly Proof was being beta read. Since I had already written several short stories between my mystery novels, this seemed like a reasonable plan.
What happened, however, is that while I spent my days writing in a world that existed over 130 years in the past (1880 San Francisco) I was spending my evenings doing the research needed to create the new world, New Eden, set nearly 300 years in the future.
I read scientific articles on things like wormholes, space stations, EmDrives, and whether or not species can cross breed, poured over the maps that Cheri Lasota was creating for this new world, and then I worked to construct brief biographies for the ten Founding Families who took the journey from old Earth to the new solar system.
In the process I participated in lively online discussions with other authors interested in writing in this world, to settle such questions as what language should the colonists from Earth speak once they were on New Eden? What kind of transportation system would they build and should they have money or just online credits? How would the psychic powers work? And could the new settlers from Earth and the Ddaerans (the name we gave the natives) be able to have sex and reproduce? Heady stuff!
As we had these discussions, I became particularly interested in the Yu Founding Family who would specialize in clean energy production and distribution and trying to figure out how the psychic abilities we decided to give the native Ddaerans would work. Consequently, I started to sketch out a back story for this family and consider how I could write a story that would introduce readers to the goals of the ten Founding Families as well as how their actual colonization of the new planet would unfold.
In the end, I fell in love with New Eden (or as the natives called this world Ddaera) and its inhabitants. And when I began to write, the short story I had planned soon became the full-length novel Between Mountain and Sea, the first in a series of books I would go on to write about this world, which I called the Caelestis Series because the Yu Founding Family called the nation they set up on New Eden, Caelestis.
Not only had I fallen in love with this world and my main protagonist, the young Mei Lin, but readers, often fans of my mystery series who gave it a try, said that they were falling in love as well and wanted to hear what happened to her. At this point, I am proud that Between Mountain and Sea, has 4.4 stars with over 1300 ratings on Amazon.
As for the short story I will start to publish here next week, I actually wrote Aelwyd right after publishing Between Mountain and Sea. I had been asked to organize and write an introduction to an anthology of short stories set in this universe, and Aelwyd was my contribution to that anthology. For anyone who is interested in seeing how other authors used this shared world to create stories, this is a link to that anthology which is available on Kindle.
My next post will look at what I wanted to accomplish with Aelwyd and how it fits into my Caelestis series.
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I enjoyed reading about your creative process and the history of the project.
Fascinating back story on the series! Thanks!, We have a number of the books in the series and have enjoyed them. Looking forward to the short story and the new novel.