I have released Seven Thunders.
This is news a very long time in coming. I started this blog back in 2012. If you look back through the archives you can see in that first year how I started writing it and finished early the next year, and began a tortured journey to finding a publisher. I struggled with that for years.
I had also begun my independent publishing journey, then.
Writing it was part of my original push for tackling book-length projects, which later concluded in a project that still sits in a single printout I’m not sure will ever see the light of day, but at any rate, though I published these through 2015, that was also when my mom died and I stopped being able to write at that length for a decade.
Building myself back up required a lot of work, which culminated in deciding to publish the Danab Cycle myself, after successfully tackling Collider.
The relationship between the first and second books in the series was set up in the opening chapters of Seven Thunders all those years ago. Collider ends in the peace talks that fail spectacularly at the start of Seven Thunders, as humanity makes a desperate bid to salvage relations with the Danab, who had invaded Earth a century earlier in the event that introduced it to the galactic community…
It’s called the Danab Cycle because these stories pivot around how humanity reaches the stars, how the existence of the Danab defines everything, the signal event that has two origins, the birth of the Danab themselves and the war they brought to Earth, the Calamity. For a long stretch the series will end up settling on Earth’s later adventures, stray from the Danab, but then it’ll circle back…
But in each of these stories, it’s multiple stories. Every character has a saga to tell.
For me, there was never a conflict between being a fan of Star Wars and Star Trek. I loved Star Wars because of the sweeping adventure. I loved Star Trek because it told such intricate human stories, in the best of its characters, even when they weren’t human (sometimes because they weren’t). When J.J. Abrams came around and updated the cinematic Star Trek experience and everyone complained they were too much like Star Wars, now, I was…giddy! This was exactly what I knew I needed to do! That was 2009, before I had written any of this, before I knew how. But suddenly it was possible…
Seven Thunders is the grandest vision out of the three books I’ve written so far. It’s the most straightforward, even though its sweep frequently strays from the central characters of the brothers Lance and Craig, the latter of whom is a product of their father’s tryst with a Danab. It was written at a time when I thought it was going to be the first book, and perhaps only book in the series, so I gave it the biggest feel I could. I based it partly on the War of 1812, and partly on the Iraq War, including Colin Powell’s infamous selling of the conflict based on a single presentation to the United Nations.
As with most of my work, the villains aren’t mere villains. They have their own perspectives, too. The politician is the one who launches the war. Our heroes are all reluctant to fight. But they do! And there is horrible loss. We think of war as terrible, regardless of whether we support or abhor it. This is very much a war story. It grapples with all the realities.
But always, it is a human story, a classic tragedy. Actually, each of the first three books is a tragedy! How I write the fourth…
But that is a story for another time.
