...a successful author.
Well, successful in the sense that the two books I had written so far did sell well enough to make a tidy sum, if not enough to allow me to dedicate to my writing full-time, and did need to supplement the income from alternate sources. Continuing the drive back to home, my mind wandered to what I’d achieved so far.
The first two books had been sci-fi novels, one a series of shorts collected into a single book, while the second had been a full-length story. Praised for offering a gritty, realistic view of the future without coming across as overly-dark, or making things well as the end, which were known pitfalls of such storylines. That said, they had been called relatively simplistic in structure and words used to convey it, with side characters being flat and static.
Something I intended to avoid with the third book I was writing, and about halfway-finished - at least with the first writing before I would re-read my own story and make edits where required. Now I was really thinking about what I’d covered so far, what this new story was about:
An Alternate Earth Story, where the Americas were found in the mid-1500s, to be inhabited by a separate sentient species. Of bipedal, long tailed, digitigraded, scaled lizards. Efforts to either enslave them, or eradicate if that failed, early on hampered by the distance involved and the fact that the ships in use were square-sailed, and not built for ocean crossings, making the crews/soldiers weakened upon arrival and easier for the less advanced (technologically speaking) lizards to fight them off. This poor showing forced an accelerated designing of ‘clipper’ ships that could handle the rougher seas as well as cut the travel time, using an otherwise unpopulated island not too far away as a staging point to allow for recovery before making the last 80 nautical mile push.
Where I saw fit to begin the story was set during the 1920s equivalent. A time of Boom but a lot of simmering problems beneath the surface. Where the lizards (derogatively named blue-tongues on account of said tongue colour) still number several million and is actually climbing again, but save for a few places in South America, are very much in the minority and used for the lowest-end jobs that nobody else would want.
In short, another way of looking at the very real issue of Racism, with only the target for the abuse and suffering (to a greatly varying degree) being different. That said, progress had been slowing a great deal as of late, the amount of research, investigative work, collecting and collating of all the facts needed to make the story work on all the desired levels vital if I wanted to write a story that could feel as if it came from a time that really did happen.
Oh, how I wished I could be there, and see it through the eyes of the protagonist, Kreeghan, one of the lizards residing in New York, working as a bartender in a Speakeasy.
Then I gripped the wheel tight as thoughts smashed into my head, too fast to get the words formed.
‘Did I just say that wish out loud!?!’