Aboard the Deep Reach

Step Inside My Brain, If You Dare!

As I began working through the first chapters of Endless Darkness, it became crystal clear just how ‘out of it’ my writing process had gotten after a very long creative hiatus…

I had my outline. I had the story beats. I had a matrix of diverse aliens and personalities.

But none of it was really meshing together. It felt like components plugging into a machine. A + B + C = Story. And that was unacceptable.

A Faceless Crew

After writing two full chapters - and part of another - I was feeling stuck in the mud. I was not feeling it. I knew that my characters deserved more.¹ Their unique qualities were there, but they lacked the depth that would really make readers care about them… and their fates.

I needed to flex some of my other artistic passions, the first of which was illustrating. I felt I needed to place these characters in a scene that would draw more out. And … boy did it.

In my first rough draft, Dunny was a male Eukary. But as I was compositing the scene, it struck me not only how male-dominated this cast was, but also how much more back-and-forth Nia and Dunny would have had with a shared experience as the female crew members. So I flipped him to her, added a cowboy hat (tri-corner hat), and kept the sarcastic attitude.

Once the illustrated scene was set aboard the Deep Reach’s bridge, I could see how their personalities could shine through. What started as simple vector shapes in Adobe Illustrator became a photobashing, digital painting project in Procreate for iPad.

This scene captured the story's atmosphere. This was the rugged rag-tag team that was going to bite off a lot more than they could chew. Bolt came forward as the ego, equal parts easy-going and demanding. Greck was big, hulking, and Carter folded his arms in his stand-offish ways. Nia and Dunny both leaned off to the side, outside of the decision-making process, perhaps?

Now that I had my characters, I was presented with another issue:

What kind of ship would a group of salvage pirates call home?

A Crew Without a Home

The lore of the LongShot system centers on an abandoned experiment at the edge of the known galaxy… and the people who were left behind when it failed. The system is run by loosely connected tribes of mercenaries, toughs, scavengers, and pirates. And everything they have is just loose wires and mismatched parts bartered, borrowed, or stolen from other systems.

The Deep Reach had to feel like this, and if I was going to make this crappy ship a home… I was going to have to see it for myself before I could expect it to ever come alive on a page. The first aspect that I needed to understand was how the ship - even with all these mismatched parts - could still actually run. So I tried to think like Nia, scribbling out engineering notes on paper.

Once I could see how the ship worked, I could start to see how everything began to piece together. It wasn’t a collective unit, some Apple-esque all-in-one posh market product. It was duct tape, welded bits, frayed wires, and beaten-up old ship modules that were patched together with dongles, interpolated or translated from one language (sometimes computer languages, sometimes literal alien languages) to another.

So I built it all out.

The DEEP REACH

A Home Until the Wheels Fall Off

Once I had the faces, the characters, the lives, and the home—the words scorched the pages. I could visualize the scenes, blocking them out in my mind like a film director, picturing the characters moving through the scenes—living in them.

I’m still in the drafting process (and the next chapters are coming along), but the marriage of design, art, writing, and story came once I took the steps my brain was craving. Maybe yours needs that too?

1. especially before the events I was going to put them through… 😈