Fire for Effect

2 Weeks Until Launch

Update #5

Weekend Protocols, Lessons in the Deep End, and The Lost Lore of Vastland.

I recently took up open water swimming. I’ve threatened this for years, only to finally take the plunge (literally, and metaphorically) this summer. I chalk it up to the momentum gained by this impending launch. Ten years ago, I set out to tell a story, and here we are. What else do I feel like doing? Looking back at other liminal moments in my life confirms this is the window for inertia; Newton’s first law would agree.   

Of course, it’s easy to say you’re a swimmer when Lake Washington is within walking distance, the water temp is peak-summer perfect, and Mount Rainier presides over sunset swims. I’ll circle back on this (loop, anyone?) and see if my interest and ambition stand the winter, although history would suggest yes. 

I’m not fast, I’m deliberate. 

A phrase you might also use to describe my swimming. I used to spend entire weekends surfing Lower Trestles, a historic SoCal spot adjacent to Camp Pendleton. As it turns out, when paired with a well-rounded dose of extracurricular infantry activities (fuck you, Helo Dunker. Double fuck you, Alpha Shelf run-swim-run), getting pitted every weekend makes you nearly drown-resistant. 

I say all this so you understand that shortly after I took up this new aquatic endeavor, I had a moment out on the water, in the zone. Muscle memory took over, and I was moving. It felt great until I paused to catch my breath and made the mistake of looking down.

This ain’t a pool anymore.

For some reason, it never occurred to me that when you’re in a body of water larger than a pond, you’ve got nothing but depth below you. With surfing, you’re generally more concerned with what’s coming toward you. It’s only after a wave rolls you into a spin-cycle do you think about what’s below, which is important, since for locales like Trestles, the rock hazards lining the seafloor are exactly why the waves are sought after. A pool, by contrast, is a finite container: duck your goggle-eyes below the surface and see the full extent. Hell, you can see the whole of it without even getting in. Open water, no boat, just a body in a body, is a whole different sort of beast.

Lake Washington is a narrow basin carved out by glacial movements during the latter end of the Pleistocene era. A subglacially fed vertigo with an average depth of over one hundred feet and steep walls that veer into a pitch black abyss.

Coincidentally, this also captures how I feel right now, sitting in my kitchen.

I’ve been writing a long time. As long as I can remember. I wrote a short story about a desert planet when I was twelve. During my early twenties, I wrote letters home from the war. My war. And during the pandemic, I used my lockdown to go on a 1000-day writing streak, just because I could. Like swimming, because it felt right. Always, though, I wrote for myself. The literary equivalent of laps in a pool. Somewhere between point A and B, I jumped the tracks. Outgrew my training tank and took on the next logical challenge. Suddenly, here we are.

I’m sure this has already been a different sort of narrative experience than what you’re used to. Like ordering a book off Amazon, only before it even arrives, you find a string of text messages from the author explaining, in no lack of detail, how he hasn’t exactly done this before and, oh, by the way, here’s some deep personal lore.

Well, as I said from the start, there’s only one way I know how to do this, and that’s to write me. So you get a bit of my backstory, and now we’re going to talk about another sort of lore. Vastland lore. And, like any good storyteller, now that I told you where we’re going, first we have to go back to the start. Not my start. Where Vastland starts.

Enter, the Ma’adim Logs.

Five years ago, Vastland was at an inflection point. The halfway point, although there was no way of knowing that at the time. And this wasn’t a breakaway, hockey-stick trajectory sort of inflection point. I was trending downward on clarity, and compelling prose was already in recession. I never wanted to quit (nor have I ever even considered it, which, for a project of this length, is still surprising to me), but it was clear my ambition had outpaced my skill, and I was stuck. Trapped in a loop, you might even say.

Sure, my weekly word count was high enough that I could have churned out three mass-market paperbacks in under a year. This wasn’t about volume. I wanted to do one story, and I wanted to do it well. And the Vastland that was in front of me didn’t feel like either of those things. The opposite, actually: an honest look revealed the total for five years of effort amounted to a poorly articulated cast of characters, a plot structure that couldn’t carry a bedsheet–let alone the weight of an entire story–and a smattering of loosely related themes that made for a painful slog to the end.

Desperate, I sent the manuscript to my longtime friend (and future developmental editor), Chris Clayton. He read it, along with my existential between-the-lines plea for help. I’ll never forget the conversation that followed. Chris has a marksman’s eye for narratives; a man who can see plot problems coming before the words are even down. He confirmed the manuscript was incomplete and needed significant work. I asked Chris for feedback because I trusted him to deliver with the sort of brutal honesty I needed. He didn’t disappoint. It’s refreshing to have someone like that. Like a mirror that shows you the thing you’ve suspected but couldn’t quite see.

However, that wasn’t all Chris did, and like any good story, there’s a twist. The expected thing, hiding something unexpected: Chris was also excited. Wait, what?

In all of that mess, he’d picked up a thread I lost in the churn of it all. As he spoke, I found myself listening to someone tell a story back to me, captured through all the parts he loved most. After our call, I went over to my computer, sat down, and started a new manuscript, Vastland Reboot. I wrote down only the scenes I could recall from memory. Something about that subtle act of condensation brought to light a pattern that guided the rest of my process: all of these scenes I brought forward were ones that I felt.

To write with any sort of clarity, you must first have the capacity to think with clarity. And to think clearly, you need a baseline operational paradigm for what comes in and what goes out. An expression of self at the most essential level. I needed to remember that, and then forget it: I can imagine anything I want, but when I write, it’s kinetic. Something felt.

A month later, I was on a plane to LA for a weekend workshop with Robert McKee. For those who haven’t heard the name, McKee is somewhat of a story legend who’s been teaching a writer’s workshop since the 80s. If you’ve ever enjoyed a Pixar movie, watched The Lord of the Rings, or read a mainstream novel published in the last two decades, chances are he either directly or indirectly influenced it. I took my forward momentum, along with the salvaged scenes of my story, and I wrote. I wrote in the halls between sessions, I wrote instead of sleeping, I wrote on the plane home. By the time I was done, I had the outline, and this time, it finally felt right.

One of the most important additions to Vastland during that shift came back to something Chris had helped me identify: what happened before the book begins. Sure, we start at Chapter 1. But Chapter 1 isn’t the beginning of Vastland, and once I realized my work needed to extend beyond what was on the pages, the story opened up and became real, and I wrote from that.

While Vastland follows two main characters, this exploration of Vastland’s backstory produced a third, hidden narrative running like a current beneath the main plot. The history, folded over and back onto itself (ahem, Loop, anyone?).

And, true to the story, the process is part of the product. This narrative takes the shape of an anonymous user during the first manned expedition to Mars. The Ma’adim Logs, intercepted and decrypted for your narrative enjoyment. This also provided an opportunity to play with a shorter format and unique POV while still informing the main throughline of Vastland.

As I planned out the release schedule, I realized the compact nature of these logs interrupted the steady rhythm of our regular Monday/Thursday full-length chapters. To remedy this, I’m introducing weekend protocols:

Occasionally, you’ll find an extra chapter available for rapid consumption on Saturdays at 8 AM PST. A literary wake’n’bake, or if you’re like me, and prefer caffeine as your substance of choice, then BYOB(eans) because they don’t serve coffee on Mars, or wherever the hell it is we’re going.

Here’s an example of what’s coming for week one:

Monday, Sep. 1st (5 PM PST) - Chapter 1: Spooky Action at a Distance

Thursday, Sep. 4th (5 PM PST) - Chapter 2: Paradromic Snag

Saturday, Sep. 6th (8 AM PST) - Chapter 3: “MA’ADIM”

Not every week will have a Saturday chapter, so keep an eye out and don’t sleep on them. These entries have tested extremely high among my advanced readers, and, while brief, there’s a mystery hidden among those lines. String enough of them together, and you might just set a vector ahead of where we’re going.

Antimatter

In case you haven’t seen it, I’d like to point out the frontmatter content, similar to what you might find in a traditional print book: title page, epigraph, dedication, and preface. I did not post these with push notifications so as not to flood your inboxes, but know they exist for reference and reading as desired.

Next week, you have the opportunity to hear from my editor, Alex Sharp, who generously wrote a foreword to Vastland to kick things off.

You’ll also find a newly minted (and still blank) glossary page. I’ve heard from a number of you that Vastland is your first foray into hard sci-fi, and I recognize the territory often comes with a slew of daunting technobabble. For my part, I’ve worked hard to avoid this, favoring clear explanations of the key technologies explored throughout the story. To further support this, I’ve implemented another technique which I happen to love as a reader: the glossary. Possibly my favorite sci-fi book (and arguably one of the most influential for the genre as a whole), Dune, does this extremely well, and if it’s good enough for ‘ol Frank, I’ll steal that page from his book.

I’ll update it as we move through the story to reflect the evolving concepts and definitions without giving any of the mystery away.

There’s still one page missing from this list of typical frontmatter: acknowledgements.

It isn’t missing, I’m flipping the script. Vastland would not exist without an incredible team, some of whom I’ve already introduced. I want to make space to properly thank everyone involved, and I felt the best moment to do that was at the end, in the closing credits. I like to save my thank yous for the end. Thanks for showing up. Thanks for reading. Thanks, it was good, or no thanks.

I’ll take my chances out here, on the open water. Or, as the Avett Brothers said:

“I ain't a gambler, but I can recognize a hand / and when to hold when queens are staring back at me.”¹

To everyone reading this, you’re in it now, too. Complicit, part and party. People who, much like Chris did for that early draft, showed up and then said, “Okay, and then what?”

And I said, “It was an impossible shape...” ⭕️

Footnotes

1. The Avett Brothers, “The Once and Future Carpenter”