Thank the gods, it’s an update!
Meet Pitney Scolan. Pit, for short. He’s a decorated general, a venerated leader of the human race sprawling across the galaxy. He’s protected his species from hostile alien life, vicious native populations, and insidious marketing campaigns. He’s fiercely introverted, and he’s really excited to be retiring to his personal planet in the very near future.
Only…now he’s a dog.
A daugment, actually. A cybernetically enhanced canine, previously the doting pet of Pit’s biggest rival, General Tristan. And now it’s the only way to escape certain assassination.
Pit grudgingly allies himself with a pair of well-meaning scoundrels and sets sail for seedier space in hopes of escaping Tristan’s clutches. What he finds instead is a galactic conspiracy to force him to make friends.
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That’s the short version of Daugment, my latest science fiction novel! It’s based exceedingly loosely on the Irish legends of Bran and Sceolang, the hounds of folk hero Fionn mac Cumhaill. (You can read about them here.) As I often do, I read material outside of the realm of science fiction and found myself asking, What if I set this story in space?!
Daugment is what resulted of jotting that idea down in one of my myriad notes files. Last November, I haphazardly threw together a one-page outline a week before NaNoWriMo started, telling myself this was a throw-away idea. I had incredibly low expectations for the story when I started; in fact, I’d chosen it because I thought it would end up being an easy write and hopefully an easy read. A bargain e-book.
It may still be that, but I did the typical author thing and fell in love with my characters.
Not until February or March of this year (2015), though. I was a little distant from Pitney and Ravenna, especially, up until I’d set the book aside for a couple of months and was forcing myself to come back. Five hundred words a day. A task of an hour, if I really dragged it out. A reasonable amount of time to devote to my craft in the midst of a busy season at my day job.
At one point, I had Rave and Pit bantering about their favorite writer of introversion philosophy, and I realized who those two pups were based on. A couple of my friends had apparently decided they were going to make a starring appearance in my throw-away book, and suddenly I knew exactly how it was all going to go down.
I like these canine versions of my friends. (I like the real ones, too.) I liked seeing how they played out their story. And I’m pretty happy with this figment of my weirdo imagination.
There’s work left to do, integration of my notes and a few other rewriting tasks. Of course. That’s the thing I forgot about as a kid, as a wannabe novelist lifer: the editing phase kinda sucks. But when I really look at it, Daugment makes perfect sense as my first book. Talking animals in space?
Talk about the exact book 12-year-old me needed.
The image above was commissioned on Fiverr.