Borrowing is inevitable, to a certain degree. I tend to think every character ever written is partly fictitious and party based on someone (or more likely multiple someones) the writer knew, whether the writer even knows it consciously or not. 

Kevin McCormick – 26 January 2014

The Back Flap

There always comes a reckoning. 

Weeks after Christmas Parker lifted the contents of an armored truck on the planet Eridan, the repercussions of that event have left human civilization at the edge of chaos. Struggling to deal with the humanitarian crisis following the annihilation of the city of Bellerophon, faced with a fearsome, enigmatic entity called Legion whom they know only from scant, cryptic messages, the Galactic Coalition stands perilously close to collapse. Following the recent disputed election to the chancellorship, a civil war has spread to nearly every inhabited planet and shows no signs of slowing. While the vast majority of citizens try to avoid the fighting, a few are forced to navigate the battlefields.

Once enemies intent on bringing each other down from opposite sides of the law, Benjamin Weizmann and Atusa Navarro have now sworn to work together to escape their now-common enemy – government assassins – provided that Navarro recovers from her traumatic injuries sustained in Bellerophon’s destruction. Only days removed from her promotion at the expense of her former mentor, Weizmann’s protégé Vera Ford is tasked with pursuing and capturing Legion, whom Ford’s new boss considers the Coalition’s primary threat. Geriatric gangster Regina Bell, whose last paying gig was finding Horace Murchison for Parker, finds herself escaping the war with a small entourage of dependents, including her teenage occasional employee Desmond. Crazy-Eyes Parker, meanwhile, has vanished into the ether. She, Murchison and Zafra Kamarov are ghosts, surfacing only occasionally, in service of a mysterious agenda which gradually becomes apparent.

Book two of the “Children and Ghosts” quintet, The Silence and the Light is a story of love and faith, power and powerlessness, greed and ambition. It is also an answer to the following question: when God reveals himself, what happens next?

About the book

What is the book about?

Continuing the story begun in its predecessor, The Silence and the Light follows ten different protagonists (though the plot threads begin to intersect and converge as the end draws near) as they cope with the ongoing collapse of the human civil authority which governs their star-faring civilization. In the meantime, unbeknownst to most, mankind has made contact with an ancient alien intelligence, perhaps an ill-timed meeting given that human society has begun to fall apart. That entity has its own intentions and goals, and may be exploiting the human race to pursue them.

If that’s a frustratingly vague description, devoid of much life or color, I do apologize. Multi-protagonist stories are frustratingly difficult to summarize with any sort of brevity, I’ve just discovered. Looking back on that summary, it makes the thing sound a bit bloodless. But I’ve tried to write a science fiction story with a heart, real people with real problems in an alien setting. At least one reviewer thus far has said it engages both the heart and the mind, so hopefully that’s an indication that I’ve succeeded at least partially.

When did you start writing the book?

I started it in July 2012, precisely twelve hours after writing “The End” on the first book.

How long did it take you to write it?

Almost exactly one year, though in truth that was nine months of writing time. The second half of 2012 and the first few months of 2013 were productive, and then I started graduate school. When summer arrived, I finally got the chance to pour out everything that had been in my head for the school term, and I wrote the last 60,000 words in about seven weeks.

Where did you get the idea from?

I always start with an image, and build outward. I won’t say what that image is, but I will say that it occurs in the prologue.

I guess I could also say that, despite it being a sci-fi series, that initiating image is never all that fantastical. Put in movie terms, it’s never something you would need to green-screen, but rather something fairly mundane and real-world with some sort of minimalist sci-fi element. My inspiring image for the first book, for instance, was an injured bank-robber, using an empty shotgun as a walking stick, hobbling out into traffic and stealing a car.

Were there any parts of the book where you struggled?

This was by far the most ambitious writing project I’ve ever attempted, much less completed. So it was a struggle balancing the various plot-threads and relatively wide multitude of characters, knowing when to end their chapters, knowing when to come back to them. My goal was for the reader, when returning to a character after a few-chapter break, to never have a mental hitch where she has to say, “Wait, who is this again? What’s going on?” I won’t name any names, but I’m sure even the casual fan of speculative fiction can name a book or two that might have benefitted from cutting the cast down just a bit. It’s so common there’s even a TV Trope for it, “four lines all waiting.” My goal for this story was that it would feel like a fast, engaging read in spite of the large cast. Also, each chapter should end with an enticement, creating a need to know what happens next, but – and this is crucial – without resorting to cheap cliffhangers. Cliffhangers you’ve earned are one thing, but they should be used like they’re gold.

I have no idea whatsoever whether I’ve succeeded in creating that type of story. I leave it to the reader to judge.

What came easily?

Writing is never easy. But I suppose what came relatively easily was the dialogue. You can’t spend two books with the same characters without knowing how they’d vocally respond to a given situation.

Are your characters entirely fictitious or have you borrowed from real world people you know?

Borrowing is inevitable, to a certain degree. I tend to think every character ever written is partly fictitious and party based on someone (or more likely multiple someones) the writer knew, whether the writer even knows it consciously or not. Most of my conscious borrowing comes in the form of physical appearances (which I tend to downplay anyway, as I feel speculative fiction generally over-focuses on them), and little slice-of-life moments.

The line between a scene feeling real and feeling written is extraordinarily thin, particularly any scene involving any kind of emotional intimacy. It’s a subtle difference, and it’s something with which authors at every level struggle. If you can borrow and adapt something that happened to you or someone you know, it lends it that much more of at least a sense of reality, in my opinion.

Do you have a target reader for this book?

My go-to answer for this is that there is no such thing (because my own interests run so broadly, I describe them only as “anything that’s good”), but that’s not exactly the case for genre fiction, I suppose. If you haven’t the slightest interest in science fiction, this probably isn’t the book for you. At the same time, if your only science fiction preferences run heavily on the science and less of a character focus, this won’t be your cup of tea.

And don’t take me wrong – I love both purely character-driven fiction, and more science-driven genre fiction with less of a people emphasis. All I’m saying is that this story is exclusively neither of those things. My goal for this book was a heavily character-driven story in a believable science-fiction setting, so my target reader is one who would find that appealing.

How was writing this book different from what you’d experienced writing previous books?

Because Silence was so much bigger than the last book, I ran into a strange problem I hadn’t anticipated. It’ll take a bit of explanation.

My writing process isn’t terribly methodical or careful, at least not in the first draft. I’m more of an “in-the-zone,” full-speed-ahead type, just get it on paper and fix it later. I’m not a careful, or even necessarily a competent, outliner. I write that way because I simply don’t know how to do it the other way, where you know the whole story ahead of time, where each line is carefully crafted and constructed with mathematical precision. Believe me, I’ve tried.

The danger of the “just get it on paper” writing process is that the longer a project goes, the greater chance you have of repeating yourself. In spite of being a story about many different people, it’s only coming from one brain; yours. And your brain remembers all the syntax you instinctively prefer, even if your conscious writing self isn’t thinking about them. So you run the risk of re-using turns of phrase, lines of dialogue, or worse, even plot situations. This is by no means something unique to inexperienced schlubs like myself, by the way. I was reading a book by one of my favorite writers the other day, and he used the same distinctive phrase twice in two different characters’ internal monologues, within forty pages of each other. Admittedly this isn’t a huge writing sin, but it did take me out of the scene for a moment and make me say, “oh, he liked that phrase, and forgot that he used it before.”

So I went back through Silence when I was finished and excised all the echoes I found. I won’t say I found them all, but I think I caught the most egregious.

What new things did you learn about writing, publishing, and/or yourself while writing and preparing this book for publication?

Writing the second book is both easier and harder than writing the first. Writing “the end” on a good novel that you enjoyed writing, that you think others will enjoy reading, is an incredibly difficult thing to do the first time. That goal will keep you hungry and focused.

With the second one, your skills will have improved, but that enormous milestone of “just finishing something that you think is good” is no longer the carrot hanging in front of your face, keeping you going. I think there’s a reason that for more than a few series, the first in the series is often generally acclaimed as the best installment. Holding onto that energy and drive isn’t always easy in the middle of a large, multi-volume project. So you have to keep adjusting your goals upward, keep getting better. For a lengthy series, the goal ought to be for each book to be better than the last one, to never repeat yourself, and to tell a complete story with a single arc, as if it were one large novel. I’m not sure if any book series has ever accomplished each of those, but unattainable goals are also not such a bad way to keep yourself focused on improvement.

And, as always, I relearned the importance of rule number one of writing: keep writing.

End of Interview:

Get your copy of The Silence and the Light from Amazon US, Amazon UK, or Barnes & Noble.

If you haven’t read the first in the series, A Voice in the Thunder, you’ll want a copy of that, too. Get it at Amazon US (paper or ebook), Amazon UK (paper or ebook), or Barnes & Noble.