I suspect I am the last one to find out about this site, but it’s still cool. Great place to research castles for your fantasy novel, or just daydream about how to spend your hypothetical lottery winnings.
Also, here’s an interesting study from 2018 of how Lake Powell in Colorado suffers from water management rules that favor keeping Lake Mead (downstream of Lake Powell) filled, and by extension favors the lawns, swimming pools and delta smelt of California, the most populous area supplied by Lake Mead.
Ularti, the owner of the tramp freighter Vanner, keeps Jetay and Khed in indentured servitude, and is one of the main antagonists in Shadow Captain. Jetay’s story arc, as previously told is that of the drifter Drafted Into a Good Cause, and frequently in that arc, there’s a character who the drifter used to work with, who represents the pull away from the Good Cause. I didn’t have a good sense of what that might be in this case, until I hit on the “Hansel and Gretel” framing for Jetay’s situation.
This is actually a fairly large body of characters spread across the two volumes of Star Master, even if they didn’t require as much work on my part as Shenti and her family did.
-It will be free for five days, starting today, so if you don’t have a Kindle Unlimited account, this is a great time to check it out!
-Like a lot of authors, I have a love-hate relationship with Amazon and its dominant place in the ebook marketplace at the best of times, and certain developments at Amazon have led to me deciding not to renew Shadow Captain’s participation in the Kindle Unlimited program. If you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription, you will have until June 18, 2022, to download the book for free. After that, Kindle Unlimited subscribers will not be able to download the book for free, but if you have already downloaded it by June 18, 2022, you should be able to read it at your convenience.
I began making up stories at a fairly young age, 5 or 6 years old, I think. At that age, my family moved around a fair amount, lived out of hotels from time to time, and some of our videotapes didn’t necessarily have the whole movie on them.
The White Knights are largely my response to the Jedi: a fallen order of psychic warriors formerly revered for their nobility of character, now hated and propagandized against. They were called Paladins, and the Red Knights were called Pioneers, until the early stages of editing Shadow Captain, when I decided these names would cause too much confusion with the Partisan faction in the same story. Akira Kurosawa, although certainly extremely gifted, didn’t have quite as much influence on me as Howard Pyle and the Story of King Arthur and his Knights, so that accounts for some of the differences between the White Knights and their inspiration, the more samurai-influenced Jedi.
Star Wars. The Star Master setting comes from Star Wars. Maybe a little from Battlestar Galactica, because I’m pretty sure I saw the original Galactica on tv at around aged 3 or 4, based on where I was living at the time, and might have first seen Star Wars: A New Hope on tv as late as age 5. But I would go on to see A New Hope many, many times, because my family owned a limited number of child-friendly movies on videotape* and A New Hope was one that my siblings and I could all agree on. A lot of what I know about plotting, I first learned from A New Hope.
-One key plot point for Slaying a Tyrant – the villain’s magical enslavement of the mercenaries who work for him – didn’t occur to me until 2016, several months after finishing the rough draft. It came to me during a trip to Disney World with family members. Make of that what you will.
-“Rijal” is a man’s name, and the Jaiyan name for the Pole Star, but it was loosely based on my name for a childhood pet.
-Four to six characters in Loving a Deathseer are loosely based on characters from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. One of them is gender-flipped: Sir Thomas Bertram is the inspiration for the female politician whom the bad guys are targeting. Two more are composite characters: the politician’s husband is a composite of Lady Bertram and Mr. Bennet (from Pride & Prejudice), and their spoiled daughter is a composite of Maria Bertram and Julia Bertram. The others are pretty obvious if you’ve read both books.
–Scapegoating a Hero is very vaguely inspired by the Nanavati murder case, but has dramatic differences from the real life story and the various films based on it. For one thing, the heroine does not commit adultery in Hero, and for another, the fallout from the case within the judicial system is less drastic in Hero. The public figure known as the “Father of Jaiya” in this book is not intended to resemble any real world figure.
–Hero is probably my own favorite of the Jaiya Metaseries, just because I was trying something very different from anything I’d done before. It was an interesting challenge, and since it involves a murder trial and some legal maneuvering, I was very pleased when the lawyer in my family liked it.
-During NaNoWriMo2017, I tried to write what would become Saving a Queen. At that time, the story was loosely inspired (with different geography and the usual fantasy elements) by the British siege of Jhansi in 1858, but I quickly realized that this was a story too grim for me to tell. Over the course of 2018, I came up with a different story, about a young queen escaping after her city fell to siege, and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.
-Airships had been a minor element in the NaNoWriMo version of Queen, but the hero’s personal lighter-than-air craft became a major player in the final version of Saving a Queen, practically a co-star. (“I liked the one with the balloon,” a family member told me, once I’d published all of the Jaiya Metaseries.)
-Chronological order for the Jaiya Metaseries: Slaying a Tyrant, Saving a Queen, Scapegoating a Hero, Seeking the Quantum Tree, Marrying a Monster, Waking the Dreamlost, Loving a Deathseer.
-Publication order for the Jaiya Metaseries: Marrying a Monster, Waking the Dreamlost, Loving a Deathseer, Slaying a Tyrant, Saving a Queen, Scapegoating a Hero, Seeking the Quantum Tree.
-The order in which the Jaiya Metaseries was written: Loving a Deathseer (November 2010), Marrying a Monster (November 2013), Slaying a Tyrant (November 2015), Waking the Dreamlost (Summer 2016), Seeking the Quantum Tree (November 2016), Scapegoating a Hero (February 2017 to mid-2018), and Saving a Queen (November 2017 to October 2018).
Slaying a Tyrant
Marrying a Monster
Loving a Deathseer (November 2010)
Saving a Queen
Waking the Dreamlost
Marrying a Monster (November 2013)
Scapegoating a Hero
Loving a Deathseer
Slaying a Tyrant (November 2015)
Seeking the Quantum Tree
Slaying a Tyrant
Waking the Dreamlost (Summer 2016)
Marrying a Monster
Saving a Queen
Seeking the Quantum Tree (November 2016)
Waking the Dreamlost,
Scapegoating a Hero
Scapegoating a Hero (February 2017 to mid-2018)
Loving a Deathseer
Seeking the Quantum Tree
Saving a Queen (November 2017 to October 2018)
Left to right: Chronological, Publication, and Writing Order for the Jaiya Metaseries
Jaglion Press 