… and every origin story can be found somewhere in the chaos.
Over the last decade I’ve been working on a book called BLOODFLOWER, a story that began with an empty world and role-play characters who had outgrown their space. I’d toyed with the idea of stepping away from role-play to pursue novel writing and made the decision to toss those characters into the empty world and see what happened.
Boy… did they take extend themselves and take control of everything.
What began as a project to mash some of my favorite concepts together turned into a deep passion with claws so deep I sometimes forget which world is the real one. Or maybe I should say: I know which world I wish was the real one. When I first wrote BLOODFLOWER, it started three seasons before the current version with Captain Jon Ayers, a prison guard about to have his life ripped apart, as the main character. The story included close to ten POVs and only half of those characters had any distinct agency—and that wasn’t even the most broken part of the narrative.
Somewhere between 2013 and 2016 I left the book to rot in a corner and wrote other stories. But when I picked it back up, I knew immediately that I’d written it wrong. While the captain was the hero for sure, the central focus wasn’t really about him. So I started thinking about the world, the series as a whole, and the real, underlying narrative between the Alliance, starship Hàlön, and the stolen moon Sandaris.
The deeper story is about Jàden Ravenscraft, a young scientist who is handed all the wrong cards in life and told she has to do better. Meek, compassionate and a bit skittish, her story for BLOODFLOWER starts four thousand years after she’s born. Begin with a hypersleep pod, a dead ex-boyfriend’s video log, and a an exiled prison guard, and you have the first step into a series that’s intended to circle through four generations of characters while Jàden ages slower than molasses.
During a Writer In Motion project last years, I decided to shake things up a bit. I have two universes (one for Jàden’s story and another for dragon things), and I wanted to see if they’d ever crossed paths. Turns out… they have, which prompted the 2019 Writer In Motion short story: Fire & Whiskey.
Yet there were still pieces I hadn’t pieced together, and in January 2020 I embarked on yet another revision of BLOODFLOWER. Something kept nagging me though every time I got to a certain point in the story. One of the characters, Braygen, has a deep connection with Jàden that I’ve never been able to figure out. No matter how many times I try to dim their fire, something is there that won’t be extinguished. It wasn’t until I discovered the seventh key and that neither character has a past life (that’s trackable) did I learn their connection goes much deeper than Hàlön, the Alliance, or this universe.
Welcome to Karathé Station, their former starship.
One day I plan to tell this origin story, but for now BLOODFLOWER is the only book on my radar, and the captain is our hero. The amazing Carly Hayward of Book Light Editorial has chosen to work with me on Jàden’s story for the 2020 RevPit showcase (coming in June).
In the coming weeks I hope to produce several more blog posts sharing my excitement for both this project and the opportunity to absorb all of Carly’s wisdom. This is a story I can’t wait to share with the world, but for today it’s back to coffee, a hot shower, and a lot of editing.
Catch up with everyone soon!
K. J. Harrowick
