It begins!

I am incredibly excited to announce that the first book of the Starship Nameless Trilogy is now available on Amazon!

This is the first novel written by myself and the incredible Patrice Fitzgerald working together, and the first novel I’ve had published ever. I am barely able to contain myself. It was a heck of a long way to get to this point. For anyone that’s interested I want to share here some of the history that led to this below. But first, Hello! I’m Jack. I’m launching this website mostly as an easy catalogue of my work but also as a place I can blog and keep track of this whole process. I’ll be announcing new stuff here and on my twitter. Shouldn’t be too long before the list of works is more than one book long.

For those that are interested in some history. It was almost three years ago that I first began toying with the idea of the Commonwealth and the worlds that they ruled over. I’ve been going through recently and looking at some of my old notes from that time and so much of them seem almost unrecognisable compared to what this became. There were a few things though that remained from the beginning. The idea that this malevolent empire would pretend to be a force of good. That ordinary people could live and die without ever realising that their lives were being ruled by a far from benevolent force. And the idea that, beneath this seemingly omnipotent institution’s feet, a world of crime and smuggling would secretly flourish.

I spent years playing with the world without ever really knowing what to do with it. I game-mastered a few sessions of a table-top RPG I built set in this world. I penned a couple of first chapters of large, sprawling space opera sci-fi novels, without any of them really finding momentum. I kept trying to write the whole thing, the wide view of the Commonwealth and its citizens, the entire history of it in novel form. At the end of three years all I had to show for my efforts were a couple of disconnected scraps. Characters with no plot, events with no context. I thought for a long time that it would end up as nothing more than a few scattered ideas.

Then Patrice appeared.

I’d had a few friends point out the Beyond the Stars anthology of space opera short stories to me. Not being enormously connected to facebook myself I hadn’t seen it until it was shown to me. I’ve never been much of a short story writer so at first, I ignored it until I realised that at least one of the many first chapters I’d written could work on its own. I sent it in thinking nothing would happen. Patrice’s first emails to me were very patient and very kind. She saw potential in the story even if it wasn’t quite ready to be printed yet. She offered helpful advice and punched up what I had written into something far better and far more interesting than it had been before. I was elated. This first collaboration gave me renewed hope for the world I had created and made me think again about the places I could take it. I went back to those old scraps and started trying to pull something together.

Yet still, I didn’t quite have it. Still, I think, I was thinking too big, too profound. Trying to tell the whole thing at once. I kept trying to write big grand space opera plots, but my mind kept turning to the ordinary people, the little guys of this world. I had no idea how to make the two concepts work together.

After talking it over with Patrice, it was she that suggested us working together on something set in this world. Something new and, more importantly, something smaller than what I had been trying to do. Together we worked out the beats of a plot about someone that was too small for the Com to notice, a criminal and a smuggler. We started working together on the first book and straight away I felt like finally I had found what this world was good for. Adventure! Mystery! Crime! More importantly though it allowed me to have a wide range of characters on a crazy cross-galaxy adventure together while being hunted by an unstoppable enemy backed by the most powerful force imaginable.

This whole process of collaboration has been one incredible rush from start to finish. I can’t possibly thank Patrice enough for everything she’s done. That’s a big part of why I wanted to write this little history here, so that I could make clear just how important the collaborative parts of this process were from the beginning. I don’t know how many more works are going to be listed eventually on this site, or how many more blog posts I will write here, but from the start I wanted to offer this tiny scrap of advice to the world. If you’re an author, or any kind of artist, don’t be afraid of collaboration. Yes, many good works are the result of one person acting alone, but many others are the result of two or more minds working in unison. I’m sure it doesn’t always work out as well as it has done here, but it’s absolutely worth trying.

So thank you, thank you, and thank you again to Patrice for taking the time to work together with a total nobody like me. And thank you to whomever has already read our efforts and to everyone who will in the future. I cannot wait to share even more with you all.