As you search for inspiration for the story you are taking so much from the world you see but as you perceive it changes everything. It is the difference between seeing the brighter side of its darker one. I’m a science fiction guy, love the idea of looking up and wondering what is up there, what exists beyond not just our planet but our solar system.
So last year I decided to do some world building, I created a universe that I didn’t think exist, that I would want to read about. I’ve worked out the science, technology, development and places. I dove in before I ever had the story developed but I need to get beyond everything that I’ve already built to find the way to introduce it for me.
I thought about how transit seems impossible between Earth and another solar system, I wanted to take a different spin on faster than light travel, so I took a good hard look at it and tried to make my universe’s transit different but familiar at the same time. I thought about keeping it as real as possible.
Like many modern movies and stories I wanted to show that life, is rare and that intelligent life is rarer still, by magnitudes. The world sees the distance and the vastness and it isn’t forgotten, the dangers for traveling far are real and tangible in this world. It is not something that s like driving a car.
I wanted to set it at the point where we had climbed out of the nest but were still tethered to home, that the risks are unknown and the fact that intelligent life had not been found meant that people had free rein to do as they please. While this isn’t the case I wanted to open a door to a new world.
It is about feeling like you can look over the horizon and still not know what is out there, that there is still so much to discover and that you could be the first person to set their eyes upon the wonders we have yet to comprehend.
So I have more than 30 thousand words written of background, as John Truby would say the ghost. All this work is the foundation of the world I built but it isn’t the story that I have yet to find but each day I get closer to seeing what it should become. You can go anywhere, I can go anywhere and I want to make a world that feels like it can be real no matter how impossible it seems.
To make something that exists beyond a person but is felt to be owned my all those who read the words and imagine what it looks like to them. I think that’s my goal, what matters and that is why I write.