Welcome to the commentary for the first four episodes of Starlight Universe.  I always find behind the scenes stuff interesting; I like to know how things get made, so I thought it might (or might not) be fun to share some information on how SU came to be.  I you want a TL;DR version of this, it would go something like: “I sat down at the keyboard and typed.”  But there’s really a lot more to it than that, so if you didn’t get enough of my incessant rambling elsewhere on the site, dig in.  I’ve got more!

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As the first episode in a brand-new series, there is obviously a lot riding on “Moments of Transition.”  I still have some reservations about the absolutely glacial pacing, but I nevertheless feel that it sets up the series quite nicely.  To be frank, I am not good at beginnings.  If you want me to end something?  Absolutely!  Just look at the number of people I’ve fired from my day job!  But for some reason I tend to struggle with beginnings.  As you work your way through the novel, you will note that it gets significantly better the deeper in you go.  A year or two down the road, when there is (hopefully) much more Starlight Universe for you to enjoy, I expect the quality will be significantly higher!  Which isn’t to say it’s LOW quality right now.  I’m just saying (and forgive the poor grammar): You ain’t seen nothing yet.

 

To really drive home the notion that I suck at beginnings, I have no less than five different iterations of “Moments of Transition” on my hard drive.  The oldest one is actually called “New Beginnings,” and while the bare bones of the story are present and accounted for, there are some major differences.  Since this is probably the very first draft of the story after I decided to divorce my work from Star Trek, there are a lot of holdovers from my fan fiction days, most notably, the Starlight crew.  When the story was functioning as Star Trek: Perseus, it served as a direct sequel to my previous bit of fan fiction, Star Trek: The Final Frontier. As such, a lot of the crew carried over from old to new.  Names like Erin Keller and Lucas Tompkins should be familiar to any reader of TFF. These are characters who are, of course, notably absent from SU.  Starlight Universe serves as more of a spiritual successor to TFF, and with that in mind, I thought it would be best to cut all ties with the old cast.  For now.  You will note that Captain Hunter receives a missive from Admiral Christopher early in “Moments of Transition.”  That would be Alan Christopher, of course, Captain of the Starlight during The Final Frontier.  So if your wallets are willing to fund more episodes, I would say there is a very good chance that we’ll revisit those older characters eventually.

 

Those other iterations of “Moments of Transition” are all variations on a theme.  I struggled a lot with pacing in these opening chapters.  At first, my desire to start the series with the plot firing on all cylinders prompted me to have the phase transition appear in the first scene of the first chapter.  But it didn’t work.  Starlight Universe is an entirely new universe; opening the series with its destruction was probably the dumbest choice I could have made.  It would be akin to having the Enterprise get destroyed in “Encounter at Farpoint.”  There’s just NO impact.  And so came the excruciating process of finding the right balance between world building and plot progression. 

 

For a long time, I thought I could still start with the phase transition, but have the Starlight far removed from the action.  In early those drafts, the Hunter and Mitchell didn’t realize the anomaly was a phase transition right off the bat, so it was treated more as a mystery that gradually unfolded while the Starlight was en route to Tarqaron.  I had some success with this route, but there were two problems built right into it.  First and foremost, if the phase transition is supposed to be the centerpiece of the entire series, having it occur 700 light years away—without our heroes present—kind of mitigated its impact.  The other problem was distance.  The phase transition is not a very immediate threat to begin with.  Having it 700 light years away meant that it would take 700 years to pose a threat to the Orion Alliance.  There just weren’t any stakes. 

 

I’m not sure if I specifically mentioned it in these first four episodes, but Tarqaron is like… 250-300 light years from Earth.  It’s still remote, but not so remote that the phase transition won’t ever pose a threat.  Moving Tarqaron closer to the Alliance, and moving the Starlight closer to Tarqaron also opened up a lot of opportunities for meaningful worldbuilding.  In those early drafts, the crew never visited Tarqaron.  The chase sequence on the beach with the beast… none of that ever happened.   And that’s a critical scene.  Not only is it one of the few action beats in the early chapters, it also establishes Tarqaron as a place with some value. 

 

Speaking of Tarqaron’s surface, it was actually inspired by this odd piece of art I saw that was made entirely of vegetables.  Like, the hills were broccoli crowns and the trees were giant romaine lettuce hearts.  I kind of stepped away from this in the final version because it turns out lettuce trees were silly.  But that artwork is definitely the inspiration for the surface.

 

Despite all the changes to the opening chapters of “Moments of Transition,” one thing stayed constant in every single version of the story: Aidan’s nightmare.  That is one of the few scenes I kept from Perseus, and ironically, it was never actually in Perseus.  I wrote it, fell in love with it, but never found a way to use it.  When I started Starlight Universe, there was never any doubt about where to start.  I dropped that scene at the front of the novel and it stayed there, mostly unchanged.

 

Let’s take a minute to talk about the characters.  It has been said (by me) that complex, interesting characters are my forte.  At this stage, I’m not entirely certain if they’re complex.  Complexity is something that develops naturally over time, and with one novel’s worth of story, I’ve only planted the seeds for complex things to happen later.  But I do feel that I’ve managed to develop some interesting characters.  From the outset, I felt that I had a pretty good handle on just about everyone.  Even some characters like Courtney and Alex, who don’t have very much to do in the beginning, still came across as I intended.  The only one that I truly struggled with is Vivic, due in part to her alien nature.  What is an Azdahr?  I didn’t know, at first.  Writing is a process of constant discovery, and as the story progressed, I was able to get a much clearer picture of not only Vivic, but of the Azdahr as a whole.  I mean, it would be great to just sit down and brainstorm a whole bunch of ideas and come away from that session with a fully realized character.  But it doesn’t work like that—at least not for me.  That brainstorming session is a good start, but that little storm is just one part of a vast and dynamic system of storms, and they interact in ways you can’t possibly imagine in one brainstorming session.  So truly discovering a character doesn’t really happen until you’re in the trenches, having them interact with the universe you have created.  I never envisioned Vivic as the badass she turned out to be—but it was a very organic process.  I had a good foundation for the character, and setting her loose in the world I created allowed her to evolve into the character she was meant to be.

 

At the opposite end of the spectrum, I actually found Za’lon very easy to write for.  Even though she’s an alien, the Corathi were already very well established in TFF (as the Elorg, which I had to change because Elorg is the company responsible for licensing Tetris.  And because Corathi sounds a hell of a lot cooler).  So I knew exactly what I wanted with her, and translating that to the page was simple… which is odd, considering out of all the characters, Za’lon is the one who I have the least in common with.

 

As I noted earlier, this first episode was initially called “New Beginnings.”  Nothing wrong with that title, especially since some of those early drafts featured a white hole as the disaster of choice, instead of the phase transition.  But when I finally locked into the transition, and I started thinking about some of the themes in the episode, “Moments of Transition” seemed to work beautifully as the title.  And yes, it is stolen from Babylon 5.  But you know, I traded like… two messages with J. Michael Straczynski on a CompuServe forum back in 1998, so the two of us are practically buds.  I’m sure he doesn’t mind.