Preamble, or why I stopped worrying and learned to love writing
Back in 2020, when [ABSOLUTELY NOTHING] was happening, I had decided that writing was a passion that I was not only wanting, but able to pursue. Since 2018, I had been writing short fiction, poetry, silly little missives, and generally just trying to sharpen up my skills. With any luck, nobody will ever find this writing. It is terrible, and should be burned, its ashes scattered, into the sun if possible.
At the end of 2019, I began a short story called, at the time, Sarah’s Mind. I finished it, or thought I did — I ended up correcting it about eight times after it went live because I switched a few genders and completely forgot to check that ALL the pronouns changed everywhere cause I’m a dumbass. At the last minute, I changed the name to Eleanor’s Mind. I have an ex named Sarah, you see, so I didn’t want her to read it and think that I wanted what happens to Eleanor nee Sarah to happen to her. (if you’re reading this Sarah, that’s true. Sarah is just a nice name).
I did what they tell you to do in all the articles you see on the net about writing a book. Got a cover made by my sister for me, then got another cover made on Fiverr (this before I knew anything about the hellscape of the gig economy). Slapped it up on Amazon and Smashwords (this is called “going wide” in the biz, apparently). Waited for them sweet sales to rack up.
Still waiting.
Ultimately, the story is interesting, but it’s too short and hasn’t got the polish you’d really want from a paid product. I keep it on the store mainly because I don’t know what else to do with it. Maybe I’ll offer it on my website for free when I get one (soon) for posterity’s sake.
I didn’t let it slow me down. It released on April 1, 2020, and [ABSOLUTELY NOTHING] had really kicked off. I was working from home three days per week, and what’s a boy to do when he’s stuck in the house rationing loo paper? I worked on my next book, which despite my wishes to write a cool cyberpunk thing, ultimately turned into a story of self-acceptance and change through the eyes of a drug addict reeling from the death of his friend. It was called Spice Trader.
It released in June 2020, at which time [ABSOLUTELY NOTHING] was well and truly in full swing in Melbourne, and as a result I sold a modest amount of books because people literally had nothing else to do. We were only allowed outside for one hour a day, and that was usually taken up by walking to the shops to get more Warhammer groceries.
I am immensely proud of both of these books, but I finished the process and had the distinct impression that I needed to learn more. I didn’t keep a detailed reciept or anything, but I think I’ve more or less broken even financially. I needed to do more, and in the midst of the worst of the fear of [ABSOLUTELY NOTHING], I had to distract myself.
So I did what every other white male millennial hipster douchebag trapped indoors did.
I started a podcast.
Audio Fiction.
The last story I’d had featured the beginnings of a cyberpunk surveillance state, and my first had been a short thought experiment on the nature of consciousness. So I began writing a story… ABOUT A SPACESHIP.
Because who doesn’t love a spaceship. Look at this thing!
This is the artwork I commissioned for my super cool and fun story about a spaceship. I commissioned it from a guy called Jon Stubbington, who was excellent to work with and I’ve been a repeat customer of his since.
The podcast is called Sunward Sky, which is a cool name for a cool spaceship. It’s available on pretty much all platforms, and is hosted for free on Anchor, which I recommend if you’re starting your own podcast. Just don’t expect monetisation to materialise.
I put a call out on twitter (@huntingsunrise, in case you were wondering) for an artist to draw me a spaceship, and I was surprised to find myself inundated by… furry porn (my mum is subscribed to this. Mum, don’t google that term).
Like, I think these NSFW artists just set up bots that auto-DM people when certain keywords are in their tweets? Whatever, if it helps them make a living. Anyway, I eventually landed on Jon, got the (again, super cool) image made up, and set to work on the podcast.
Going into it, I had no idea what the story was. I just wanted more of a fun, spaceship oriented story of some sort. To give you just an idea of how seriously I was taking this at the start, I didn’t know what to call my characters, so I looked up the list of names of famous cricket players and picked them at random. In the first few episodes, Healy (Ian Healy, what a wicketkeeper!) changes his profession aboard the craft from mechanic to general dogsbody to medical assistant, purely because I hadn’t thought anything through.
Any other writers reading this, I think you’re probably going to find the next part very funny.
I had written four episodes, and an into episode. They were around 3000 words long each. I decided that the first season would have ten episodes, all around this length (at my reading cadence that makes them approximately 20 minutes long), and I would release them weekly. Without, and I cannot stress this enough, a story to tell yet.
I had planted some seeds of intrigue and killed off poor old Michael Holding by flinging him out of an airlock (his nickname in cricket was “whispering death” because of the silent nature of his run-up… so throwing him out into space? WHERE IT’S SILENT? We amuse ourselves in strange ways sometimes), but I genuinely had no idea what to do with the overarching plot. My cool spaceship was cool but ultimately devoid of depth, and I’d just put deadline pressure on myself.
[ABSOLUTELY NOTHING] meant I could finish the first season.
At the time, work was not doing great things for my head, and I took time off. I kept wondering why I was expected to continue as normal at work while it felt like the entire world was collapsing around my ears. As a result, I was able to throw myself into writing the podcast, and the weekly. I came up with the idea of a shipwide conspiracy, a worker’s revolt gone wrong, and a secret that drove Alyssa (Alyssa Healy, what a legend. No, Healy and Alyssa aren’t canonically related in the story despite the fact that their namesakes are) to join the crew of the Sunward Sky in the first place. Space travel went from a cool adventure to a kind of indentured slavery, driven by the sickness caused by being locked in a capsule with no gravity and nothing else to do. People in the ship could become obsessed with overthrowing the status quo, radicalised to violence to the point of becoming a suicide cult.
I’m not sure where I got all these ideas. Certainly nothing happening in the latter half of 2020. Not at all.
I managed, finally, to write my 10 episodes. I learned how to record, make it sound okay-ish, got it all done at a time when, I gotta tell ya, my headspace wasn’t great, and kept to an episode per week schedule that I really struggled with. More than once, I found myself writing in the early hours of the morning then immediately recording, then sleeping until mid-afternoon the next day. During that time, I was unhealthy. Eating poorly, drinking a bit too much, getting no exercise, and stressing myself out trying to keep to a timeline for a podcast with a self-imposed deadline.
Not that it mattered. I think all told in the first season the show got listened to less than 100 times. A few of my friends tuned in because they, like me, were bored out of their minds and listening to my spaceship
Audio drama is a thing. There are shows like The Dex Legacy, Welcome to Night Vale, and any of hundreds more stories with full casts and music, telling interesting stories. I didn’t really engage with any of them at the time. I would like to have said that it’s because of Covid, the lockdowns, and my own personal issues but it’s honestly because I was lazy. I just… didn’t listen to them. Once per week, I’d post on the reddit audio drama forum announcing the new episode, where my posts got pretty much ignored because I wasn’t part of the community. I was just some guy.
It got done, though. The story that had started as a silly spaceship story with cricket player names for characters and no plot had transformed into a dark sci-fi talking about workers rights, the degeneration caused by a lifetime of unsafe work, a terrorist plot, and the desire of someone to help despite the uncaring structure of the system around them.
The season ended with an enormous cliffhanger, and I announced that I’d be back soon with more Sunward Sky. I had thrown everything I knew what to do at the story to that point, and I had no idea how to continue it.
But I had to come back, because I had to finish my story.
You know. The story that I had no idea how to finish, because I’d run myself out of plot again.
I didn’t know at the time that this wasn’t how people wrote shows. They’d write a season. In advance. They’d record it. In advance. They’d edit and workshop and develop and come up with ideas. On the whole, most projects don’t follow a “suck it and see” approach.
But I didn’t know that, and I was just a guy who’d written a couple of novellas and was trying to write a story for the sake of having something to do.
Join me next time to find out what happened when I went back for Season 2. Subscribe below, if you’re interested. You can also listen to Sunward Sky on all the podcast apps for free. It’s a good story, I promise. Also, cricket players.