Whew, it’s all done. I really can’t thank you enough for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the ride! If you did, then I humbly ask that you consider leaving a review on Goodreads or Amazon (or here on Royal Road!) so that readers can know whether my obscure indie book is for them, and also just to support it. Reviews help a ton.
I want to thank everybody who made it this far on Royal Road. I've been tossing around the idea of throwing Book 1 up on here for a while. There's this traditional view that you don't want to give your work away for free, but well . . . visibility is everything, and I personally don't believe artists of any medium can afford to be so stingy. I'm at a stage where I'm not looking for sales—I'm looking for readers. Hope you enjoyed this story. I can't promise I'll ever post Book 2 on here . . . but if you stick around, I'll be posting the Appendix material, (of which there are three: one for characters, one for places/terms, one for worldbuilding details), as well as some sample chapters from Gaea.
Background
When I first sat down in 2016 and wrote the prototype novel that became this trilogy, I had a few working ideas already. The oldest involved a young man on our world (it may have been a fictional one; I forget) who encountered some aliens from another, very close, planet. Aliens with the ability to “world hop.” It was a pretty literal thing. This other world was called Luun, and was essentially the moon, but highly technologically advanced and populated by people with strange powers.
Then that became two other worlds, Ccalcitek and Legalei. Legalei was a world of magic, the other a sci-fi world of advanced technology. Ccalcitek was still the moon in that iteration. I thought I was a genius, because surely no one had thought to blend fantasy with science fiction before (yes, you can laugh).
2016 Camp NaNoWriMo rolled around and I decided, “All right, I’m going to finally give this a shot.” I’d written one and a half novels at that point (throw in a couple dozen extra fractions for all the stories I had great ideas for but only ever started), but I wanted to write something new, and in one go.
Mani was a 41,000-word barely-novel, fast-paced at the start and totally rushed near the end. It followed a girl with super strength called Lynchazel—she went by Lynx, though—who lived in the city of Nytaea . . . all that stuff. Her powers were far more deadly, to a horrifying degree, and things went quite differently (e.g. Phoebe died on page seven). Around the two-thirds mark, it went off the rails and suddenly they were all off-world. Bing batta boom and the book was done.
Glad I rewrote it.
After splitting the story up into three parts and doing some actual outlining and a . . . little bit . . . of worldbuilding, years of working on that same project and answering the same questions with “Still working on it,” Mani was done. A few trips through the transmogrifier and it was a workable story that made sense. I decided to go ahead and write Gaea before doing the final edits, just to make sure my continuity was right.
Inspiration
Anyway, now for the fun part: What went into it? Believe it or not, my first inspiration for this story was the 2013 film Man of Steel. Superman’s backstory on Krypton captured my attention in a way few prologues ever have. Final Fantasy VI and FFVII’s storylines also contributed, as well as my reading The Wheel of Time and some of Brandon Sanderson’s works. I wanted to tell the story of two worlds linked by a strange history, one that wasn’t tied down by genre conventions and traditional storytelling methods. I experimented with this along the way and eventually ended up with the final product of Mani, whose tone and viewpoint usage I think fit the book as well as it could.
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Research
Yes, I had to do a lot of research for this project (even though it’s very soft sci-fi). I combed through to try to make it as accurate as possible to the concepts I was drawing from. For instance . . .
Mani is Gaea’s moon (in fact, named after the Norse god of the moon, Mani), as revealed partway through the story. There are hints throughout for the observant reader. Mani is just a hair larger than our own moon in circumference, about 8,000 miles, but of course there are . . . distinct differences. The reason day cycles are a month long on Mani is that, just like our moon, it orbits Gaea once per day, facing the exact same direction relative to its big sis, and takes a whole month (28 days on Mani, for author convenience) to make its own revolutions relative to the sun, Sol. According to my astronomy professor Wikipedia, this is known as tidal locking, which gives a moon such as ours or Mani a 1:1 orbital resonance—that is, it spins no more or less than the degrees of its orbit.
Therefore, the surface of the Moon that we view is always the same side. This inspired me to make a world whose people are trapped on the “Dark Side” of their own world, meaning they never see the planet they actually orbit. If someone lived on the Dark Side of the Moon, and you told him his world orbited a planet called Earth, he would think you crazy, unless he had been to the Light Side and seen it. Thus, on the continent of Darsor—the Light Side of Mani—Gaea dominates the sky and cannot be ignored, but I wanted that to be a surprise for the characters from Argent.
(Side note: a viewer from Gaea would be seeing the entire continent of Darsor—technically not a full face of a planet, but it would give the same effect. The gibbous and crescent shapes, etc., of Mani’s phases would simply look slightly different from our own moon’s.)
The aurora cycle, then, was invented to give the impression of days passing on Mani. (It’s total magic, so there’s no scientific basis for it, of course.) During the sunlit phase, clouds come in and cover the sky to make for artificial night, and in the sunless phase, bright auroras ripple in the sky to light their days. The Wellspring came about later, when I realized I wanted there to be a reason why a rocky, barren planet would be capable of supporting life after . . . well, no spoilers. But, as mentioned in the book, the Wellspring is the only way there can possibly be life on Mani. Just like the Energy Field in the atmosphere that controls the artificial day cycles, the magic of the Wellspring causes water to flow out over the face of Argent and then cycle back up from the depths of the Down Under.
What about the continent of Darsor? How does it receive water? We’ll save that for the next book, among other things.
For the record, Lyn is stronger and has a different body composition than a full-blooded Legaleian because her mother was from Gaea—a world with a far larger mass and thus, heavier gravity. On Mani, actual planetary mass is tricky to calculate due to its unique shape, but a little fantasy helps one to pretend gravity works similarly to on our world. It’s just a bit lighter. Technically, it is the silver in both continents’ makeup that gives the land its power of gravitational stability (floating), same as the Sky Islands. The core of the planet is what regulates actual gravity experienced by humans, etc. Silver is the power that defies it. In the Down Under, gravity is lighter yet, and a strange force of magic protects people from impact when they fall.
One large challenge came when I went back and cross-referenced dates and times to see where I was describing the sun rising or setting and in between. Ugh, what a nightmare. Only then did I realize how far off it was. So . . . I tried my best, adding in dates and sun positioning for scenes and chapters. Any slight miscalculations can hopefully be forgiven. For those wondering, this was difficult because, as one travels a globe, one’s position relative to the sun’s angle changes, and on Mani, much more steeply because the circumference of the world is about one-third the size of Earth’s while the day cycles pass 28 times more slowly. Therefore, one can nearly chase the sun around the planet. From Ti’Vaeth, the center of Argent, to the middle of the Sea of Emptiness in the east or west, there is a time difference of seven days (think of it like time zones).
I think I’ll stop there, as I don’t want to bore anybody to sleep. Hopefully this was a little interesting and/or explained some questions. See you on Gaea!
