Stars of Blood and Glory (35 page)

“
Did you ever think you would
live to see this day?” she asked.

He turned to her and grinned. “Perhaps.
After all, cyborgs never die.”

Author’s Note

When I wrote
Bringing Stella Home
and decided to base
that story loosely on the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258, I
knew I would have to follow up with the Battle of Ain Jalut. That
was the basic genesis of this story—a desire to write a sequel
where the Hameji experience their first decisive defeat.

Even though the basic premise of
the story was floating around in my head since mid-to-late 2009, it
sat on the back burner for several years. I had a vague idea for
the plot, but I didn’t have any characters or a story. At the same
time, a lot of other projects were clamoring for attention. I did
some major revisions for
Bringing Stella Home
in the spring of 2010, then basically
redrafted most of
Desert Stars
and finished it over the summer. That one still needed a
major revision, though, especially with the ending. In the
meantime, I started a handful of other projects and focused on
querying literary agents for my finished work. I had just graduated
college, and was struggling to get my feet underneath me in a very
bad job market. At the same time, with nothing to lose, I was doing
everything I could to work on my writing and turn that into a
full-time career.

The story began to take shape
when I rewrote the ending of
Desert Stars
in the spring of 2011. After finishing that novel,
I started to wonder what would happen to Rina and Tiera in the next
few years. I’ve always enjoyed indirect sequels that take a minor
character from the first book and make them into a major viewpoint
character in the second. That’s something I’d planned to do with
the Gaia Nova series since the beginning, so it was quite natural
to take those characters and think forward a few years. I figured
that Tiera would strike out her own path and leave issues of war
and politics behind, but Rina would definitely have a much rougher
time adjusting. As I thought about her character, I started to
wonder what she’d be like as an assassin. That really sparked
something, and I decided to run with it.

It took just a few days to write
the prologue, largely as it now stands. I guess it worked out well,
though, because I submitted it to a first chapter contest at
Leading Edge
magazine and placed
high enough to be published in issue 63. However, I didn’t do much
with the story after finishing the prologue, since I was
getting
Sholpan
ready for publication. After that,
Star Wanderers
dropped in my lap, and I wrote
the first novelette in that series over the course of the next few
months. But always in the back of my mind,
Stars of Blood and Glory
was still
percolating.

I wanted to bring back Danica
and the mercenaries from
Bringing Stella Home
, especially Roman. Older characters have
always been difficult for me to write, so I saw his viewpoint as a
challenge that could teach me something new. From the beginning, I
knew that Danica wouldn’t get a viewpoint. Her character arc got
its conclusion in
Bringing Stella Home
, so she wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.
However, I wanted to kill her off—not because I hated her, but
because I loved her character so much. My general philosophy about
character deaths is that everybody dies, so the best way to honor a
character is to make their death mean something. Danica certainly
is the type of person who would make a heroic sacrifice—indeed, her
whole life is almost something of a heroic sacrifice. So with that
in mind, I figured out what sort of impact her death ought to have
on Roman, and used that to shape his character arc.

The overarching conflict between the Hameji
and the Federation came together while making a map for the Gaia
Nova series as a whole. I patterned it after some maps on Wikipedia
of the interstellar medium around the local cloud, and realized
that these sorts of high-density regions would make for a great
storytelling device, since it acts as a barrier to FTL. I’d
casually mentioned a star called New Rigel in a previous story, and
when I put that one on the map, it ended up near a relatively dense
area of space. With that in mind, I drew up a stellar rift with two
white dwarfs at either end: Eyn-Gatta at the head, closer to Gaia
Nova, and Eyn-Jalla (Ain Jalut) closer to New Rigel.

The idea for Shinihon and the
far-future Japanese culture grew out of a desire to populate my
universe with more than just white people. I guess the desert
tribesmen of Gaia Nova technically qualify for that, as well as the
Hameji, but I think there is a tendency in science fiction for
non-minority writers to treat their own race as the default. I know
I have a tendency to do that. Of course, the flip-side is that it’s
really, really hard to write about a culture other than your own
without making some embarrassing gaffes. It’s a little different in
science fiction, since we build entire universes from scratch, but
it’s something we still have to be conscious of. With
Desert
Stars
, it
wasn’t quite as hard since I’d spent some time living in the Middle
East, but that was the only foreign part of the world where I felt
I knew something, and I didn’t want to do space Arabs again. Since
I wanted New Rigel V to be a water world, I figured that the
descendants of a seafaring culture from Earth would be more likely
to settle there, so I decided to go with a Japanese-Polynesian
mash-up. I have a lot of friends who’ve lived in that part of the
world, so I figured it would be easier to rack their brains than it
would be to research a culture I know absolutely nothing
about.

Hikaru’s character grew out of a postsecret
that really struck me. In case you don’t know what postsecret is,
it’s a blog where people mail artistic postcards with their
secrets, and the blogger posts them anonymously without any kind of
commentary or anything. I’ve been following it for years, and
whenever I find a secret that really sticks out, I’ll save it to a
folder that I browse through from time to time when I’m looking for
story ideas. This particular secret read: “I want to stand in front
of a guy NAKED And have him analyze everything about me.” The thing
that struck me about it was how naïve the girl must be (and the
sender was a girl, judging from the picture). Anyone who knows
anything about guys knows that when the clothes come off, the
thinking stops. And yet, there’s something admirably fearless about
such a person. The scene between Hikaru and Roman grew out of my
reaction specifically to that postsecret, but in a way, that was a
catalyst for Hikaru’s character.

Abaqa’s character grew out of
what I figured Sholpan would be doing. After writing the prologue
to
Stars of
Blood and Glory
, I wrote a direct sequel to
Bringing Stella Home
with the working title
Heart of the
Nebula
. It
takes place five years after the events of that story, and Sholpan
makes an appearance with her baby son. For the sake of bringing
some closure to her story, and to show that something good came out
of the personal hell that she went through, I figured it would be
good to bring him in. Plus, his whole struggle to win acceptance
was a good counterpoint to some of the other characters I was
working with.

I took several months off to work on other
projects before writing Chapter One. During that time, however, I
gathered together my ideas and lined things up so I’d be ready to
hit the ground running. I went on tvtropes and browsed it like a
buffet, noting down story tropes that I wanted to play with. This
gave me a lot of interesting ideas that I otherwise wouldn’t have
had. For example, when I discovered the Fighting for a Homeland
trope, I instantly knew that that was the Tajji mercenaries.
Recognizing that helped me to figure out the epilogue, where they
finally return to their shattered homeworld. Colonel Webb grew out
of the Magnificent Bastard trope. While I don’t think he really
fits that trope the way it’s described, reading about it influenced
my thinking about his character, which moved the story in a
direction that it otherwise wouldn’t have. Also, I really enjoy the
Rebellious Princess trope, so I tossed that in with Hikaru and it
ended up driving the plot of the entire novel.

All of my prewriting came
together in the winter of 2012. I drove down to Texas to celebrate
Christmas with my family, then moved in with my parents for a
couple months while preparing to go overseas to teach English. I
started the first chapter of
Stars of Blood and Glory
toward the end of December, and
finished the epilogue in the beginning of February. All together,
it took a little longer than six weeks to write the whole thing.
For a guy who’s been known to take months at a time writing a
novel, only to toss out most of it out, that came as a huge shock.
I don’t know if it’s a sign of improvement or just all that
prewriting I did beforehand, but everything came together and the
story just wrote itself.

One of the big struggles of being a writer
is knowing when to revise something and when to let it stand. We’re
often the worst judges of our own work, and general opinions on the
subject range from Brandon Sanderson, who says that it’s absolutely
crucial, to Heinlein and Dean Wesley Smith, who say to never do it
unless forced to by an editor. Like many writers, I’ve always
resisted Heinlein’s third rule (“You must refrain from revising,
except to editorial order”), but for this project, I eventually
decided that that was the better path. This was confirmed to me
when I made some substantial revisions to the first chapter, sent
them in to my writing group, and the critiques slammed almost all
the changes I’d made while praising the stuff I’d left in. However,
when I did a quick read through over the summer of 2012, I noticed
that several of the scenes were out of order, and the chapter
divisions were not in the right places. To fix that, I did about a
three-week revision where I changed up the scene order but left
most of them intact. I also added a few scenes that were missing,
such as Roman’s reminiscent musings with Zura Tajjashvili and a few
smaller transition scenes toward the end. I did send the story out
to some first readers, but more for green lighting than a
line-by-line critique. After getting that green light, I decided to
move ahead.

That’s more or less how the book came about.
I’m still kind of shocked that it wasn’t a huge struggle to write
like the other ones, but at the same time, I can’t really complain.
In fact, I’m really happy with how it turned out. Over the course
of the last couple of Gaia Nova books, I’ve really come to feel for
some of these characters, especially Roman. The “cyborgs never die”
line came out of nowhere, but ended the book on just the right
note, at least for me as the writer. I don’t know if I’ll be doing
any more sequels with the mercenaries, but I’d love to do some
prequels and/or origin stories, especially for Danica and
Roman.

So anyhow, thanks for reading! I hope you
enjoyed this story as much as I did. If you want to spread the word
about it by telling a friend or posting a review somewhere, that
would be awesome. I appreciate everything you guys do—it really
does make a difference, which I’m starting to see now that my books
are getting a little traction. But of course, the greatest honor is
just to be read.

If you want to drop me a line, my email is
[email protected]
, or you can tweet me at
@onelowerlight. One of these days, I’m going to figure out how
Goodreads works, and then you can reach me on there. But when I’m
not busy writing, the best place to find me online is my blog,
One Thousand and One Parsecs
(onelowerlight.com/writing). There you can sign up for
my email
list
, which I use to send updates on new releases and special
offers.

That’s just about it. Once again, thanks for
reading! If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll check out some of my
other books, if you haven’t already. And even if you have, be sure
to keep an eye out, because there will certainly be more in the
months and years to come. Until next time, take care, and I hope to
see you again soon!

Acknowledgments

The number of people to thank
for this book isn’t as large as it is for some of my other novels,
but their help was still critical nonetheless. First, I’d like to
thank the members of Kindal’s writing group who helped out with the
first chapter: Kindal Debenham, Andy Lemmon, Megan Hutchins, and
Ailsa Lillywhite. I’d also like to thank my first reader, Cavan
Helps, for giving it a solid read through, and Aneeka Richins for
helping with some of the Japanese cultural stuff, especially the
honorifics (which I probably still screwed up through no fault of
hers). Cavan Helps, Andy Lemmon, Diane Cardon, Elisabeth Page,
Benjamin Blackhurst, and Marie Stirk all helped out with the
teaser, which was probably the hardest part of the book to write.
Thanks also to the staff of
Leading Edge
for publishing the prologue in issue 63 as part of
their first chapter contest. I’ve been on the staff in the past,
but I really had nothing to do with that decision, especially since
I was out of the country at the time. Finally, I’d like to thank
Josh Leavitt for his help with the line/copy editing, and Lorenz
Hideyoshi Ruwwe for slotting me into his illustration schedule,
even though he’s been deservedly busy. Thanks so much for all the
help! This book would not have been the same without
you.