Zero - Earth Fire

So here we are again at the keyboard typing out a blog post for my own work. Do not expect to read a review, I would never presume ...

Zero - Earth Fire is a continuation of the story Zero - Earth, following Zero, Joan, Wraith and the Circle of Numbers as the Khai-mah begin to arrive on Earth. This posed certain challenges as a writer. 

-What exactly does a hyperspace conduit look like anyway? 

-Space is vast, we know it currently takes us years to reach Jupiter, so I needed a mechanism which would allow us to travel faster.

-Military strategy with a twist. The Khai want land, we have land. How best should a war be fought with a space faring species? For me, if they reached the surface, the war was over.

-How to avoid a war completely?

-What could the negative effects of a conduit touchdown be? The contents are always inert.

-How to slow Zero down. In book 1, Zero is unstoppable until Quinn catches up to him, then our hero is forced to struggle and claw his way back. This causes trouble for Joan and baby Wraith, not to mention throws a giant spanner in the plans to defend Earth. In book 2, I wanted to handicap Zero in some way which has never been done before. Victory in spite of the struggle is surely the sweetest.

-How to spin a suitable twist and set the scene for book 5. (I should note at this point that Book 3  is a prequel, and book 4 currently underway goes back even further ... No spoilers!)

Chronologically book 2 was actually written third, it had to be while I put meat onto the bones of the problems above. Normally I am a proper pantser, and most of book 1 wrote itself, my hands merely emptied the story out of my head. Book 2 was going to be obviously harder, once battle began for real. There were so many things I needed to imagine in a detailed way first. That said I did most of book 2 by the seat of my pants also, and very few blockages were experienced.

The time lag in delivering book 2 like a lamb to the slaughter of Amazon was two fold. As previously mentioned, I had the idea to do a prequel whilst writing book 1. Secondly I have a day job and keeping a roof over my family's head has to come first, I simply didn't have time to work on book 2.

Once I had the idea to do a prequel, the scenes came immediately into my mind so vividly that I put book 1 on hold about 75% complete. I wrote book 3, now titled Zero - Earth Fall in its entirety, in around three months. The whole process of using the same characters but in a pre-industrial setting was a joy. If you have read book 1 and are still unsure regarding where Zero's skills come from, book 3 explains all. As such, for him to be stuck amongst us as we struggle through war after war, sailing wooden ships over tempestuous seas was quite comical to imagine.

Once book 3 was complete it was put on ice. If I couldn't wrangle the story of Zero - Earth Fire out of my head, book 3 would be irrelevant. 

Zero - Earth Fire took the best part of a year to write with constant effort and maximum concentration. Not that the story was a chore, but even up to the last edit, there were bits I still wan't happy with. Change was inevitable, but also something I decided to embrace as each change only made the story more readable in my eyes.

My proof reader heaped her praise and after that I did my final final edit. Then came the next nightmare ... The cover. If I thought putting the concepts I wanted to explore into words would be difficult, putting them into a picture was nigh on impossible.

OK Sesame fans ... Today's conduit is brought to you by the letter 'V' ... Yes, the conduit is a glass vase. Actually a pale blue, I layered many copies of the same vase over the top of each other with various colour balance adjustments to create the petrol sheen, then strategically erased bits of each layer to reveal them all. "What a chore." I hear you shout ... and you're not wrong, but it didn't actually take that long on my ipad. What took longer was Zero ... I hate drawing people.

The pose was easy enough on 3d magic poser, another ipad app, but that creates a blue dummy.

Creating the jeans was hard, the custom print Hawaiian shirt was even harder. 
The little device in Zero's hand is Geyldian's PUCK, which may or may not have provided the template for CASIO to make a scientific calculator, how can we know? ;)

As always I tried to make the red on black theme with yellow embellishment, and I think it works well. Let me know what you think.

I was happy to finally set Zero - Earth Fire free on March 27th 2020, during the Great Author Extravaganza event on Facebook. It was a labour of love and again, parts made me laugh and others made me cry. The test seems to be that when ever I read those parts, I am still filled with the same emotions. Where as Zero - Earth is set mostly on Earth and features the preparations for war, as well as Zero's hard struggle to regain his fighting fitness, Zero - Earth Fire moves clearly into space as the fighting begins. As before there are twists and turns, I hope you can be as excited by reading it as I was writing it. Book 2 was a labour of love and no mistake!