Interviewing John Dodd

Hellooo!

I recently reviewed the glorious space opera Ocean of Stars by John Dodd with added time travel, dragons and pirates (all in space). I was very pleased to have the opportunity to ask John some questions about writing the book!

How would you booktempt Ocean of Stars?

What’s better than Pirates? Space Pirates!

What’s better than Dragons? Space Dragons!

Everything is better in space.  Except it’s not, murderous bastards prowl the darkness, a galaxy consuming behemoth is held back only by dying stars, its children held in stasis by the same evil that now holds its own people as slaves and seeks only the glory of bygone times.  The women of the Unbroken Dawn stand alone against tyrants, killers, and the end of all things, but the hope they make shines brighter than the stars they sail upon.

We get a really smart three stories in one approach that still delivers a complete novel length tale. How did this come about and how did you find the approach?

Ocean was always a trilogy, but if I have a maxim, it’s Strunk and White, Rule 17, “Omit Needless Words” I don’t want to write something that describes the scenery for a year before getting to the action of the matter, I want something that runs from scene to scene and doesn’t pause for a second.  The problem with this, is that the stories I write are dense, very dense, there’s a lot of things going on, and I put them into a relatively short number of words.  This in turn made book one too short for a novel (55k), but when I spoke to Francesca, and she said that she was interested in the whole thing, but I’d need to get it down to the size of a single novel, I originally bid around 150k to get all three books done but managed to get it down to 130k.   The three separate stories were all planned as individual books in the first place, but having to make each one of them a novella that works as parts of the whole was something that I’d never tried before, and I hadn’t considered that each book would still be a stand alone book as well as part of something bigger.  In this, I have to thank Francesca for seeing beyond the appeal of the first book, I loved being able to write all of it at once without having to wonder if the first book would be good enough to warrant the second and knowing that the whole of the story would be out there at once.  It’s certainly something that I’m likely to try again at some point.

Pirates in Space – how much fun did you have writing that? How do you like to balance the science fiction elements with the adventure?

In the quiet words of Mark Watney, Space Pirates! It’s a funny thing, because I never considered the crew of the Unbroken Dawn to be pirates, even though it’s clear that they’ve had to do questionable things while they’ve been out there.  The trouble is that I can’t talk about what goes on without giving away a central part of book one, but it was great to get the difference between how the crew of the Dawn start and how they finish up, unchanged, but somehow different.   With the balance to the book, I always come down on the character side of things, if you don’t have someone to root for, then you don’t care for the outcome either way, so for me, it’s always about the adventure more than the science.  Writing the adventures is always fun, particularly when the book is running away from you because not even you know where it’s headed.

As a fan of games has this influenced your writing style?

Without doubt, when you run RPG’s, you get a sense for what the players will and will not accept, and I know that helps when you’re looking at what comes next.  With stories, you look at something and don’t so much plan it as play through it.  What would you do if you were one of the players in that game, what would you consider unfair if you came up against it.  Of course, that works both ways, it’s easy to see which bits of the book are going to be mind bending, because you think to yourself what would have you complaining as a player and grinning as a GM. Then, as the GM, you make sure that there’s a way through it that doesn’t require you to hold the players hands every step of the way.  Because in fiction, readers are the players following the adventure, you make it too difficult and they’ll not stay with it, make it too easy and they’ll get bored, the balance has to be just so and you don’t have the bonus of being able to watch their faces as they’re reading and modify the story so they stay engaged.

What else can we look forward from you in the future and where can we find out more?

I’m currently finishing off Red Sword at Night, which was an idea I had some years ago, what if aliens invaded a planet, only to find that there were magically active creatures on it already?  Again, it’s a story of the characters, set against the backdrop of epic events almost too large to consider, with the understanding that everyone can make a change to things, it’s just being able to be bold enough to try.  There are two other novella’s I’m working on. Apex was recently finished and submitted, which is the story of an interstellar exploration team finding something that they really wish they hadn’t. The other novella is Trinity, set in a universe where hostile aliens exist, three characters, one having lost everything to the aliens, one still in the middle of a war with them, and one not realising that the aliens are a problem.  All three are talking to each other at the same time, each needing something the others have, but there’s no time travel involved.  I like the idea of circular storytelling, as evidenced by Just Add Water and Ocean of Stars, but I believe the story should work by itself if told as a linear tale.  The other thing that I’ve been asked about a lot is how was the Unbroken Dawn built, what went on before we find it in Ocean of Stars, and what happened after the end of book 3, were there more adventures for the crew planned.  Ocean was in development for more than six years, and this was just the beginning of all things, there’s a whole universe out there, from the Tarlin Empire to the Ascended worlds, Corsten and the world she built in Exile, and the Metirians and their plans for the universe.  I enclose the map that we made to chart where everything was.

What books have you enjoyed recently?

The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean, wonderful imagination, superb book with a great take on vampires and the limitations that they might have, even though the V word is never mentioned.

The Language Game, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater, loved reading about how language has changed over time and region.

Only a monster can kill a hero, by Vanessa Len, superb concept, what if the villains weren’t villains, what if the hero was something that the monsters had to fear just because they were different.