Writing the Rykolien Immigrants

Grade 7, 13 years old   I remember sitting at the kitchen table at my parents house with a friend. I don't recall what creative thing he was doing, but I recall the reaction when I told an adult (not family) the names of my main characters. I used friend names, like Kevin, Robert, Richard, etc... -she was not impressed, and encouraged me to come up with something fancier, more science-fiction-y.   I designed my book in three parts, modeled after the three books of the Lord of the Rings, but in a single book:   1. Rykol: Time spent on an alien planet   2. The Journey Back: Adventures on the way back to Earth   3. To Earth: The Worldwide war that I wanted to write about

Circa grade 9, 15 years old   My parents bought me JRR Tolkien's The Book of Lost Tales, part 2, from a book club. I immediately went to the library and found part 1 and read it, understanding little of the grand story, but knowing that it was the history of Middle-Earth. Suddenly, I understood that the War of the Ring was only a very small part of the story. How wonderful!   In that moment, my view of Rykol expanded a thousandfold. I created a history of Rykol, over the course of twenty-thousand years. My Tale of Days mimicked that in the Appendices of the Lord of the Rings. Suddenly, my species and planet had a massive historical basis. And I had an idea for a second book, where I would tell the history of Rykol as told to my characters.

After finishing the first book, I immediately began on a second story. It meandered for about a hundred pages until I realized that it was very boring and philosophical, and the time travel elements required to visit Earth and Rykol in realtime made no sense. I have retained only a few pages, and could not say what it was about -which was the main problem.

Knowing that New Earthlings needed a lot more work, I went about expanding the world. I kept an old roll of cashier receipt paper in my schoolbag, and when an idea popped into my head for improvements, I jotted it down.   When enough time had passed, I transferred the notes on the roll to large pieces of paper, ordered by chapter, as well as history that could be used for building the story. I created new animal species and based on Tolkien's writings, an alphabet, plants, and more. I even charted some of Rykol's orbit and its moons, so that I could mention the phases as observed by the main characters, like Tolkien did.   Then I started writing New Earthlings -again.

Second year university, I had a class called Effective Written Communication (EWC). Part of the class consisted of regular journal entries, and most of it was free-form. I crafted most of the saga of the siims and goses during those journals, including Bolob's involvement in their mass suicide. I still have those pages, and have recently (2023) expanded on those tales.

Although adult life was getting busy, and I'd just started my PhD, I felt the need to pour through my notes and try to bring the story to final life.   It wasn't to last. I got through about a hundred pages revising and expanding yet again, the story that was still called New Earthlings, before getting tired of writing the same story over and over.

By this time, I knew what I wanted out of the Rykolien Immigrants. My intention was to write three books, set at different periods of time:   1. The Adventures of the Rykolien Immigrants (so called) on Rykol, which was the story I'd tried to write four times already.   2. The History of Rykol, in which some crewmembers travel back to Rykol and learn the history of the vekorna and kolbs, and perpetuate an alien invasion back to Terra.   3. The War for Terra, in which the later events glimpsed briefly after time travel through the wormhole are discovered. The message at the end was that history could not be changed, and that they were moving in a time loop.   I wasn't ready to write the history of Rykol, so set out instead to write the third book in this story, which takes place four hundred years after the events concluding New Earthlings.   With many breaks of up to even a year, and many breakthroughs (Kirina!), as well as the discovery of the sulci on Enceladus, I wrote this monster, 1200 pages long, and impossible to fit into a single book.

My former karate instructor, who had moved away many years ago, contacted me out of the blue, asking if I would give his manuscript a final read. I did so, and a short time later he published his first book, a science fiction story that had been banging around in his head since he was very young (sounds familar).   He became a publisher for the specific purpose of getting his books out into the market. His description of the publishing industry was completely heart-breaking, as I thought at the time that my books would be marketable to a publishing company.   I mentioned that I was also writing a book, and wondered if he would consider publishing it. He told me to come back when things were ready, and we would discuss it.

I restructured the first couple of chapters to improve the flow of the first book, and gave it back to my father for a second opinion -improvement!   I then passed it on to my sister, who told me she enjoyed it a lot, but remarked that there was no real story to it. Given that this was the first third of my one-book story, her comments made sense, as it would have been the introduction.   I added several chapters to make the impending vote all the more difficult, and a new conflict from within the Legion. Now the story had a purpose, though it still ended on a cliff-hanger.   A couple of years later, one of my fellow hockey coaches said he borrowed the book from our local library, and swore when he reached the last sentence. I was too afraid to ask if it was because there was no more book to follow-up, or because of the situation...

Having completed the Raiders Threat Trilogy, I immediately began expanding on the outlines that I'd originally provided to my first couple of readers, for what was happening on Rykol concurrently.   I was sent to southern Italy for work, and had extra time at night, and sometimes during the day, to continue writing. I drew mountains for the Temple of Spall as we crossed around, over and through the mountains of Italy.   It gave me a chance to expand on the supporting cast on Rykol, but involved so many introductions that the story bogged down almost immediately. By the time I aborted the story, I had two hundred and fifty pages written, and the story had barely started!   There was also the fact that my sister, a great proofreader who doesn't hold back on good or bad opinions, didn't like the announcement at the end of the third book that we would learn about Rykol before finishing the story of the Rykolien Immigrants.   I put this story aside, but used it to feed the conclusion of the series.

Moving full steam ahead with the proofreading and editing of book 2, not to mention commissioning that cover from the same amazing artist, I added text to the cover and spine of the first book, and indicated inside that this was book one of the Raiders Threat Trilogy.   From now on, this would be the baseline for On Alert.  

I was ready to publish everything all at once, but the recommendation is to wait a year between books, so I did.   At some point in the writing, I decided that I didn't like my original idea of future history being an unchangeable circle, so I added a way to ultimately change history. Unfortunately, it added too much to the story, so once again, even though this was the third book in a trilogy, it ended with a pause and a cliffhanger. The conclusion would be the resolution of not just this trilogy, but the as-yet-unwritten one, too.   The broken mask on book three was my idea, and for the third time in a row, the graphic artist surpassed my expectations.   Every book has its own story, of course. This time, I was struggling to meet the printer's specifications, coordinating with the artist, and seeing my dying mother for the last time. I hoped to get it out before she died of Alzheimer's, and was on the phone at her residence hammering out the final details. She died a month before publication.  

I don't know if I was dreading or looking forward to the return to New Earthlings. The title of course had been discarded, and I was now working under the title of Bolob's Reach. It was intended to be a duology, with book one taking place on Rykol, and book two on Terra.   I started with the fourth edition of New Earthlings, splicing in the remainder from the third edition after that petered out. Then I rewrote the whole thing from scratch, leaving the main events intact, but expanding the characters, removing extraneous explanation and spreading the knowledge out among several chapters.   It was very apparent to me, revisiting this after twenty years, how I modeled the first part of my story on the Lord of the Rings. Some of those elements remain, if you know what to look for.   Two years later, it looked like I would have a seven hundred page book on my hands, and the decision was made to split it into two -again. This gave me breathing space to flesh out the adventure as I wanted.   By now, my reluctance to putting immediate family on my book covers had eroded, and my oldest son got the chance to star. Once again, the graphic artist did a great job incorporating him into a fantastic cover.   And so, the Rykolien Immigrants finally saw the light, in book one: A Tremor in the Wings.  

After publishing A Light in Exile myself, I began taking control of the rest of my books. I started with the second edition of A Tremor in the Wings, even though the first edition was barely six months old.  

To complete my process, I finally took full control of all of my books (still under the umbrella of my publisher). I republished them under the second editions (third edition for On Alert), once a month until the entire series was once again available but under my control, retracting the old editions previously published by my publisher.