Return to Space Corps...

For something that doesn't really exist yet, I sure talk a lot about my Space Corps project...

Actually, a lot of this blog is about that, because I have a lot of things I've actually written that hasn't been released yet.  As with all the Space Corps talk, it's my own naive idea of letting my readers know about things I may only hope a lot of people will be talking about later.

Most of Space Corps hasn't been written yet.  It's dominated my creative development, but that doesn't mean most of what I've written has been Space Corps material.  I know plenty of writers who wouldn't even consider working like that.  If they have a passion project, they have mostly certainly devoted themselves to seeing it become a reality.  Maybe it's because of the way I originally approached it, but Space Corps has almost been too important to rush into reality.

I've got a whole series of books plotted.  I wasn't even particularly plotting books originally, when I worked on them.  It was a later adaptation of the ideas, when I realized quite stupidly that I should have been thinking of them that way all along.  And later, when I began writing book manuscripts, I only wished I had outlines that extensive.  It would have made writing them infinitely simpler.  But it would probably have also affected the outcomes in other ways.  I wrote other manuscripts in part to develop my writer's voice.  That proved to be essential when I finally wrote the first of the Space Corps adventures.  By that point I thought I had given shape to the whole saga.  I'd already completed the outline of what I thought of the time as the last story.

Recently, though, I realized there was room for one more, and quite an essential one at that.  Central to the whole saga is the relationship between humanity and the aliens known as the Danab.  In the original adventures I had already gotten past the period of their initial conflict.  As I moved back and forth on the timeline I never quite went back to that inciting event.  I started writing a few short stories that gave it shape, however, and so the idea finally planted itself in my head.  And so I knew I had to tackle the First Danab War after all.

A little like Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima, however, this is a story that will take place from the perspective of the "enemy."  I put that word in quotations, because one of the things I've learned as I've written my various manuscripts, is that I rarely let the bad guy off in a strictly one-dimensional way.  I don't know how it'll work, and I'm excited to see how this story further develops for exactly this reason, but approaching what for humanity in this saga is the defining event of history from a different point of view struck me as the only way to do it.  I avoided writing it for so long, for me personally it would have felt wrong to simply write the straight version.

Again, this is talking about something you won't see for years, probably, if you ever see it at all.  But I see this as the great benefit of being a creator, that you don't even necessarily need the approval of the public to be excited for your own work.  I just figured I'd make a note of this particular breakthrough.