The Creative Process I: The Book

​Into the Known Universe: A Cosmic Love Story, Kinda is my debut novel, but like many books, it didn’t start out as one. Its evolution is mildly interesting, so I thought I’d dedicate my first official space post to taking you on a brief journey back through space and time . . . to the year 2018!

That October, I sold my first short story, “Space Toast,” to Pulp Kings, an Indie zine based out of Calgary. It was a zany sci-fi adventure involving a luckless deep space freighter pilot, his chipper robot assistant, a crew of ghostly pirates, grotesque alien slugs, a lot of trademarked appliances, and—most importantly—an intergalactic quasi-fascist retail emporium called GaliCor (space turtles also briefly factor, which tells you just how seriously I take my work). They paid me a kingly $300, which I subsequently blew on having my first rejection letter—which I received from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for the same story back in 2015—professionally framed. It hangs above my desk to this day.

After the first wave of Pulp Kings wrapped, Ian (the CEO of Stray Books, Pulp Kings’ publishing company, and a pretty swell guy) offered me a five-part serial that would run through wave two. I knew I wanted to do something more with GaliCor, but I wasn’t entirely sure what GaliCor looked like yet. We toyed with several ideas, including having the main character be a corporate insurance adjuster investigating the suspicious wreck of a freighter in uncharted space, but nothing really popped.

Eventually, I hit on something with narrative potential—what if a guy, some low-level cog in the corporate machine, got offered a promotion in exchange for retrieving something from a missing freighter, only for that something to turn out to be his boss’ runaway wife? They’d get swept off into the wider universe on a world-hopping adventure, be forced to rely on one another for survival, learn to work together, etc., etc. It had all the trappings of a traditional love story, and because traditional love stories annoy me, I saw it as a prime opportunity to subvert all the usual conventions and tropes and do something different. Ian thought it was a damn great hook and commissioned me to get cracking. Six months later, I submitted Love and Reclamation, a space adventure in four parts (a fifth would have been purely filler). 

Alas, it was not to be. Stray Books sadly closed its doors in 2022 due to financial strains from a certain pandemic, and Love and Reclamation’s run ended after only two issues (disheartened as I was, I found it somewhat poetic that my adventure serial ended on a literal cliff-hanger). Left with a half-published manuscript and a dream of seeing it in Chapters, I devoted the next few months to expanding it, editing it, revising it, proofreading it, tinkering with it, fine-tuning it, obsessing over it, and occasionally completely rewriting it. When I signed on with FriesenPress in January 2023, it kick-started another solid year of expanding, editing, revising, proofreading, tinkering, fine-tuning, obsessing, and rewriting.

This book represents a nearly four-year-long labour of love, the final version of which is quite different from the one originally written for Pulp Kings. For starters, it’s about fifty thousand words longer. Second, you may have noticed it’s no longer called Love and Reclamation, as my editor thought that title sounded like a self-help book for couples (fair point). Overall, It’s a semi-episodic space adventure, a subversion of romance tropes, a journey of discovery, an occasional horror show, and a love story . . . kinda.

I wrote it for you, and I hope you enjoy it.

​Check back next Monday for a brief insight into my favourite aspect of writing – character creation!