Hello reader, and welcome to the online sci-fi serial, The Bloodlet Sun. You can start by reading the introduction or browsing the table of contents, or feel free to jump into the first chapter below. Enjoy!
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The thrum of the ship as it skidded along the surface of subspace would have chased most into their stasis pods for the duration of the journey. For Mikarik, it was the sound of home, of a reprieve from responsibilities or the unforeseen twists that life had such an unpleasant habit of delivering. It was the pause between the times when choices needed to be made and when decisions mattered.

He never understood those who crawled into their pod the moment they came aboard, and went into an empty sleep that terminated days, weeks and sometimes months later, after the ship had already safely docked at the end of the journey. Granted, they banked some of that time, it being generally believed that one ages at only one-third the regular rate while in stasis, but were a few meager years at the end of one’s life really worth the wasted opportunities?

Mikarik slept only when he was tired, retiring for his usual fourteen-hour sleep cycle, without any regard for how his biological clock would end up needing to be calibrated when he arrived. The destination always had its own rhythms. Its own time and length of day, its own peak of activity whether it was high noon or the dead of night or the temperate spaces of dawn and dusk where it neither threatened to freeze you nor boil you alive.

And in between the inconveniences of having to replenish his energy, he ate, and read and wandered whichever sections of the ship where not closed to the public. Encounters with others were usually scarce, as most preferred the get-it-over-with option of submitting to near-death.

Sometimes he spent days without interacting with a single sentient, but he was rarely alone for long. Though few shared his appetite for an entirely solitary and wakeful journey, others often woke up along the way and depending entirely on their personality and Mikarik’s moods, provided welcome company.

The long-haul passenger cruiser he currently found himself on, and likely the penultimate trip he would ever undertake, had left Vaparozh three months prior, and would be docking in orbit above Earth in less than a week. It was one of the longest voyages Mikarik had undertaken, and even he felt as though he was on the verge of going stir crazy. Like all ships built on Vaparozh, it was structured to accommodate their strictly gender-segregated yet somehow austerely egalitarian culture, with one dining hall for the males, one for the females, and a small and run-down hall, where Mikarik spent most of his days, for those passengers that came from barbaric cultures that allowed their genders to co-mingle during such holy rites as eating and sleeping.

He had been largely alone for over a week, as even restless travelers preferred to catch up on sleep just prior to their destination, which left him plenty of time to aggressively tap his pen against a blank page in his notebook and summon words that refused to do his bidding. He thought he was being amusing when he chose posing as a poet as his cover for the trip. Instead, he unwittingly subjected himself to the a frustration he hadn’t felt since spending weeks pretending to be helpless and adrift in orbits of rocky moons waiting for pirates to strike.

He expected no more company for the remainder of the flight when a very groggy and disheveled Mraboran female entered the hall and appeared either startled or confused to find him there.

“Good morning. Please, don’t mind me,” Mikarik said in Trade Thorian as the Mraboran ran her hand through the tangled fur on her forehead, clearing it out of her golden eyes.

“I didn’t expect anyone else to be up.” She responded in fluent Thorian that betrayed the barest hint of an accent.

“Neither did I, but here we both are.” He switched to his own native tongue and watched her through the bottom of his glass of water. She walked over to the food dispenser, which served slim pickings after a long-haul flight where most passengers were expected to forgo eating in favour of stasis, and poured hot water into a cup of something fragrant. Nothing Mraboran as far as he could tell, a floral scent he couldn’t identify.

She must have caught him sniffing. “Chamomile.” And after this elicited no reaction added, “It’s from Earth.”

“Ah.” He’d encountered humans before and was vaguely familiar with them, but they weren’t so eclectic that he would have any exposure to their cuisine.

Between the fluent Thorian and the human tea, this Mraboran seemed to go out of her way to show him how cosmopolitan she was. He scratched a couple of words in his notebook, as she took a seat across from him and watched him over her mug, inhaling its vapours.

To the untrained eye, there was no discernible difference between Mraboran males and females. Both were covered with the same short sleek fur that ranged from dusty blonde to a shimmering copper, and both had the same sonorant voices with the slightest hint of a hiss. And while females were marginally more partial to using belts to strap their tails to their body, their clothing was generally unisex. But Mikarik had worked and lived among enough Mraborans to know that the key lay in the eyes. Males looked at you with a round dumb expression that was perpetually surprised. The females’ eyes were narrow and calculating and constantly sized you up as potential prey. Even hundreds of light-years from home there was no getting away from evolutionary biology.

“You should try it, helps you get back to sleep when you’re knocked out,” she suggested after taking a long sip from her mug of chamomile tea.

“I don’t get knocked out,” Mikarik responded without lifting his eyes off the page.

“How’s that?”

“Can’t get knocked out if you never go in.”

She put her mug down then and drew out a long “Really?” Doesn’t matter how fluent they are, they fall back into purring whenever they encounter the throaty “r” of the Thorian language, one of the reasons why it’s dropped in Trade Thorian. “Sounds tedious.”
 
“Pretty quiet, actually,” he put his pen down and his eyes met hers. He was at an advantage there, with his mostly shaded by his implanted glasses. The Vaparozh sun was a scorching ball of yellow flame even brighter than most of the suns of the habitable worlds, a stark contrast to the dim red glow on the Thorian homeworld of Kai Thori. He spent the first week of the journey trying to find a way to dim the lights and eventually gave up, ending most of his days with a headache.

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I have something very exciting to share with you. Okay, I lied, I have something very exciting I’m about to share with you, and I wanted to introduce it. Those of you who have been following my blog will have acquired an awareness that I’m not primarily a genre author. Both the novel I’m currently editing and the one I’m currently writing can be best described as literary fiction. Not to say that I have any aversion to genre fiction. Most of my early short stories were science fiction (think really crappy Black Mirror episodes), and one project in particular has been growing in my head for a decade and a half now. And it’s this project that I want to talk to you about today.

The Bloodlet Sun has its roots all the way back in high school. Having grown up on Star Wars, Babylon 5 and to a certain extent everyone’s unfavourite Star Trek series, Voyager, I have always longed to create my science fiction or space fantasy universe. It was one of those ideas that I always believed in but knew for the longest time that I did not have the requisite ability to give it justice. It has suffered through many stages of the creative process since then.

I attempted to actually put it down on paper once, and never got past the first chapter. To give you a sense of how the project has evolved since then, not a spec from that original first chapter, except a couple of character names, has survived into the vision I currently have for it. I’ve bounced plot ideas off my friends for years, being met with everything from encouragement to “this particular thing makes no sense.” I took every piece of feedback I received and threw it into the cooking pot that The Bloodlet Sun has become.

For years I worked on additional plot lines, finding ways for them to intersect and grow in scope. I’ve worked out additional details of the universe going on for years in each direction to make the world seem more dynamic and “alive”. I rewatched Babylon 5, read and watched Game of Thrones, and the Kingkiller Chronicles and dabbled in the fine line between inspiration and plagiarism. I’ve noted similarities to other works and tweaked them into something different or else embraced them and made them my own.

It’s amazing how much goes into a piece of work that’s not necessarily “writing”, which again why I think one should not define their writing by soulless “words per day” goals. If you are truly a writer, then it doesn’t matter whether you have a pen in your hand. Your mind is always working through ideas and plot and dialogue. So much of a writer’s craft happens in their daily life, and I’ve extolled the virtues of this “off the page” writing on multiple occasions. However, every piece of advice can go too far.

Over the last few years, The Bloodlet Sun has been stuck in worldbuilding hell. I’ve convinced myself that I can only return to writing it once every meticulous detail is in place; only when every character has a name and complete biography, every alien race has a name and history and the all the star systems have been mapped and their political relationships defined. For some writers, this works, but in my case, the project was tied to an unrealistic goal.

And so as I was reflective on my last year in writing, on my successes and how to grow them, I decided that perhaps this would be a good time to stop procrastinating. I feel reasonably comfortable with the framework I have in place so that the story won’t get away from me, but at the same time, I need to start growing it organically.

So I’m excited to announce that starting next week, this blog will become the home to The Bloodlet Sun, which I will plan to release in somewhat irregular intervals over the course of the next whenever, since I will be posting it at the rate that I write it. I want to do this with a manageable schedule and in manageable chunks as I don’t want my other projects to be sidelined. But because this story is always itching to be written, I think this will be the perfect opportunity to allow myself an outlet, and finally share with the world something I have been working on for basically half my life.
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So here’s hoping that it catches your eye, and that you stick around through the adventure.

​A year ago, shortly before I started this blog, I was a writer with only a single published credit to my name – a third-place finish in a contest run by a trade journal. Just under a year later, I have three literary journal publication credits, and recently reached a new exciting milestone – my first publication in a physical printed journal.

Yesterday my copy of the Nashwaak Review Volume 40/41 arrived, and it contained one of the most exhilarating things for a writer – my name in print. Although I talked a bit about my short story “Nightfalls” and its acceptance last year, I once again want to thank everyone involved with the Nashwaak Review at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick who saw merit in my story and thought it was worthy to be published in their journal. Without your hard work and dedication, writers like me may never be able to find a platform to share their writing.
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It was pretty exciting showing the journal off to everyone, and particularly pointing out to my kids their dad’s name in the journal. They’re both huge bookworms and it was such a special feeling showing them that their dad contributes to these things, too. The older one assumed it was a published version of the bedtime story I’ve been crafting for them for weeks, and I said maybe one day. Because this is a print publication I’m not able to share it with you directly, but you may find it at your local library if you’re in the New Brunswick area, or else order it from them directly. Either way, I wanted to talk a bit more about the story itself, hopefully serving up some helpful advice along the way.

Without retelling the whole story here, I first want to touch on what Nightfalls is about. The premise is that one day, the sun sets and it never rises again. Eventually, the light from the moon and the stars also disappears, and humanity is forced to create its own cycle of day and night by regularly shutting off all the lights and plunging the world into impenetrable darkness.

The story follows the protagonist, Jonas, as he struggles with his own feelings of hopelessness, despair, and apathy in a world cast into inexplicable darkness, until he discovers something that may just bring back a light of hope into a dark world. As you can see, an element of magic realism that was present in my first publication, Ursa Major, and to a lesser extent in Slippers, is also present in this story. It seems to be my most successful genre so far, which has got me to rethinking my writing lately.

Often I hear of new writers who say they’re bursting with creative energy, but they don’t know what to write. I think “Nightfalls” is the perfect example of the fact that inspiration can strike from anywhere. I was driving down a dark highway from a friend’s wedding, contemplating my existence up until that point, and wondered what it would be like if the streetlights up ahead were the only light left in the world. Granted, the formation of the story itself was more involved than that, but that is essentially all it took – a single thought on the drive home. So if you want to be a writer, and you’re searching for something to write, don’t try to have the next great novel implanted firmly in your head before you write the first word. All it takes is a single image, as ephemeral as a shooting star, to start putting your story together.

“Nightfalls” ended up being deeply personal to me. Though starting off as a casual thought it quickly grew into something bigger. If I recall the timing correctly, I had just graduated with my Bachelors and was ready to go to law school. I attended the wedding of a good high school friend and ruminated on the difference between my high school self and who I had become four years later, perhaps convincing myself I was now so mature when the next decade would bring arguably even bigger changes. I needed to both self-reflect, put a lid on some things, and do something kind at the end of a long journey. So I ended up gifting this story to my married friend and her husband.

While not a love story, “Nightfalls” is about hope, and every long-term relationship should be built in some way on hope. Hope for a limitless future with your partner. The story is about finding light at the end of a tunnel, and when you end up with someone you love as much as you love the whole world, that’s what it should feel like – that everything before was a little bit bleaker.

Nightfalls was written ten years ago and it showed its age. My writing had advanced significantly since then, and it underwent a couple of “post-completion” revisions over the years. My wife has long tried to convince me to leave my old writing alone. She is right of course but there was something about some of those old stories I couldn’t let go. So as I picked up my publication efforts in earnest earlier this year, I thought that now that I was in my thirties I would give some of them a final coat of polish, promising myself that if they didn’t get published in this form to just accept it and move on. I don’t know about you, but I develop a sort of familial attachment to old completed works, especially ones that have sat in the “good” pile for so long. It brings me immense joy to finally see it succeed.
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But at the same time, I wound up sitting on conflicting feelings. On the one hand, I know I need to move on and not dwell over things conceived and written when I was essentially a different person. Yet on the other hand, I want to bring these stories to life and share them with the world. I think what it ultimately comes down to is the same thing that applies to any writing rules, and that is that there are no hard rules that are applicable to everyone in every situation. That’s why I recommend taking each piece of writing advice you sea not as a piece of a puzzle or another step in this grand instruction manual of writer-hood, but rather as an ingredient to throw in a pot. Some ingredients you use more, others less, the flavours interact with each other in different ways, and at the end of the day, you get the kind of writer that you’re comfortable with. So do you in the best way only you know you can.