7 years from the first haunting scene that wouldn’t leave me be, so it got written down.
5th attempt at figuring out the story around the scene.
18 months of stop-start struggle with writing it. (It popped up and wouldn’t leave me alone when I was blocked on another book. In the process of blocking on this, I have written and then gotten blocked on two other stories. Always, always coming back around until persistence paid off, and it went to beta readers.)
5 months after finishing to get it published. (There was a lot of life, no few medical issues, and Vellum updating overnight and corrupting the file just before publication. …and while backups are a good idea, only successful restores matter.
…less than 12 hours before the first reader finished it and left a review.
Yeah, Dust of the Ocean had a difficult birth, but it’s out there, and that won’t be undone now. Not that it was the end of the problems…
We adapt and overcome. 38 hours after launch, it’s still not searchable, so people can’t find it except through my author page or a direct link? Time to launch an Amazon ad, so the ad will show up in the search returns.
*deep breath* It’ll be okay.
It’s an odd book. It’s over twice my usual length, and though it’s set in the same universe as Shattered Under Midnight, it’s a standalone.
It wasn’t written to market. It was written as an homage to Andre Norton, and to Michael Whelan – not so much his cover art, though if you’re a long-time fan of his, you may recognize one of two of those pieces worked in. Mostly, this is a love song to his fine art, the ones he did for himself instead of for a pre-existing story.
I intentionally started it as an attempt to break out of my genre. I picked horror, for reasons I won’t go into here, since it failed. Mainly, because although the worldbuilding was full of darkness, and the weight of the repercussions of horrible people doing terrible things, both long-dead and still in power now… The characters fought me with utter determination, and made a space opera out of it.
Which… is very like Andre Norton’s own worlds and characters.
As I write this just after release, I have no idea if it’ll fly or it’ll flop. I take comfort in the words of Neil Gaiman:
The things I’ve done that worked the best were the things I was the least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either work, or more likely be the kinds of embarrassing failures people would gather together and talk about until the end of time. They always had that in common: looking back at them, people explain why they were inevitable successes. While I was doing them, I had no idea.
I still don’t. And where would be the fun in making something you knew was going to work?
And sometimes the things I did really didn’t work. There are stories of mine that have never been reprinted. Some of them never even left the house. But I learned as much from them as I did from the things that worked.
I did learn, a lot.
Where we go from here? I don’t know, but it’ll be interesting!
Mad Genius Club 
16 responses to “Dust of the Ocean”
Just well into it, I’m reading at a slower pace these days for a variety of reasons. Only two minor typos so far, in all better than most tradpub stuff. Am finding the two main characters intriguing to say the least. As with all your books I can say unequivocally that you do write real purty.
Aw, thanks, Uncle Lar! Hope you enjoy it.
As for those typos – they survived 14 edit passes. I am going to give them a rest of a month or two, and then do one last run.
I loved the “I’m Nobody” line. 😀
Arkady has never responded like he ought to. For good and for ill!
*Yawn* Kept me up till two AM.
Yeah, I can see how this started as horror . . . but if the Characters aren’t alive enough to grab agency . . . they aren’t alive. I really like your group dynamics. And the individuals.
Thank you; I worked hard on that!
Teams are never “five of the same guy.” But I didn’t have room for all of them to be protagonists…
Glad you enjoyed it!
It’s very good. It is a bit darker and a little more bitter? No no that’s not the right word deeper, perhaps than your other works. It’s very good and I think everyone should buy a copy, but I probably won’t reread it as often as I do your other works. Your other books are comfort food for me, and I probably reread at least one of your books a week. This one is going to have to take a moment to settle.
But as always the characters are wonderfully drawn, and the group dynamics are incredible. These are good people, all of them making the best of a very difficult world.
The world building is very interesting, and very realistic in that we discover more and more about this universe with every book. But there is enough background that I don’t feel like I have to fight the book to figure out what’s going on, nor do I have to get a notepad and write down character names and relationships to keep track of things. It’s just well written.
More bitter and complex like a really dark chocolate?
It’s certainly fought me the hardest. Or perhaps I fought it. Or yes.
Next up, I’d say I need to do a palate cleanser of something pink and fluffy and kittens and shopping…. but we already saw that ends up with a teal dress and blowing up the mall.
Thank you for your evaluation 🙂
Yes, exactly like that. Like a really dark and complex chocolate.
Congrats on getting it out into the world!
Thank you!
I finished the Dust of the Oceans on Sunday (KU; will buy Kindle version later). For all its birth pangs, it turned out very well.
I’m glad it didn’t turn out as a horror novel, since that’s one genre I rarely read, even less than genre Romance.
I didn’t find it especially dark, maybe because (thankfully) the blood, gore, and destruction isn’t described in needless detail, and the team is upbeat. Psychologically, I feel that Between Two Graves is at least as dark, and probably more complex. I definitely see continuity with your earlier books, with the tactical romance, the team dynamics, etc. It also reminds me of adventure novels (although not terribly similar, King Solomon’s Mines came to my mind), which is a sadly neglected genre.
I’m still trying to figure out how the various pieces between books fit together. IIRC, the Conclave, Imperium (probably not Solarium Empire), and Inshi are mentioned in Business Not Bullets; the Inshi are mentioned in Between the Graves, and Dust of the Oceans has Conclave and Sollies (plus Hym’Ree, which I can’t remember anywhere else).
The Hym’Ree also show up in Shattered Under Midnight.
It’s a big galaxy out there, and there are lots of polities and races. Some human, at least two post-human, many never were human to start with… and the various stories so far are separated by several hundred years. (Not helped by several different empires all calling themselves The Empire, in the way that most tribes call themselves “the people” in their own language.)
To make it even more fun, thanks to Jump Gates, not all of them are adjacent to each other in space… but they are by the transport network.
And all the action on Kivalina is so far confined to the planet. Only AJ or Crane would refer to the planet by name, because people define things by relation to their view of the world. Going offplanet redefines the meaning of “world.”
Eventually, we’ll get to Crane as a viewpoint character, but that’ll take wrapping up the war onplanet, because Crane isn’t a local. When we get to him, it’s going to redefine the world from a very large cold war with a lot of crispy hot edges… to a very small, resource-poor, quiet backwater planet way out on the rim, effectively lost by Conclave and overlooked by the Imperium… until it’s not.
And now all your fans are going to be pestering you for Crane story.
I don’t re-read your books as frequently as Oreta, but definitely you are one of my comfort reads, and I’m re-reading again all your books after finishing this one. It’s nice that the new book was longer, more time in the book!
Well done. Kept me up last night. 🙂
I read fiction more by gestalt than by specifics; that said, thank you for introducing me to your world. The downside is of course… I want more.
Very Well Done.