It’s done! The Navigator series, which started with Parasites, is finished 🙂 I’m very pleased with it all, and wanted to take some time to look back at how it came about.
It might sound strange, but the Navigator books are a bit of a mystery to me. On one hand, I can clearly see what inspired parts of them – but on the other, I have almost no memory of how they really started.
Small Places, for example, was clearly conceived in the New Forest; parts of the village are based on the delightful Lyndhurst in the UK’s New Forest. I remember launching into writing Parasites while staying in the Rotunda, in Birmingham, creating Carthusian while wandering around Farringdon and the Barbican in London, but very little else. Its inspirations are – in part – quite clear: the hovercrafts in the Matrix clearly had a part to play in inspiring the cars, as did the sleds in Anne McCaffrey’s Crystal Singer trilogy some time earlier.
I do remember, when I started to write the trilogy, that I wanted to write something at one remove from myself. I’d finished and queried my first book, to no avail, and was keenly aware that – as most writers do – I’d written something a bit too personal. Parasites was intended to be a work of pure speculation.
I initially released it with a terrible, terrible cover, based on a photograph that I’d taken myself, before realising that it needed professional help. I also didn’t include a copyright page, and thanks to a reviewer (cheers Gaynor!) I hastily revised it. Gaynor also print-formatted it for me, for which I’m eternally grateful.
After going through a round of – very kind and positive – reviews, I set the Parasites universe to one side and worked on Small Places, before I realised that a lot of people (including myself) had enjoyed it, and that there was a lot of merit to the universe I’d created. So I wrote Dusk, which – if anything – I’m more pleased with than the original.
I hopped back and worked on Wild Court, which I’d had an off and on relationship with over the years. That was a much bigger commitment, but again, I was pleased with the result.
Exodus initially felt like a bit of a ‘hygiene write’: I’d written two books of a trilogy and I really wanted to tidy things up and finish it. But after some thought, and playing with some of the concepts – revisiting the worlds of Parasites, for example, and turning the careful Lyrans into a hasty, fleeing nation – I rather enjoyed it, and enjoyed it even after the fifth re-read edit. I have to admit a certain fondness for Irial and Dane, our irreverent and near-omnipotent beings, but have also become attached to most of the characters, not least of all our careful heroes.
A lot of people have given a lot of kind words of encouragement over the years, and I’ve appreciated all of them. Writing a book – particularly self-publishing – can be a bit of a labour of love, so it’s enormously rewarding to see that people have enjoyed it, not to mention stayed with it to the end. So this one’s for you!