Time Flies When You’re Saving the Universe

Ten years ago today, I hit the ‘publish’ button on Starshine and unleashed Alex upon an unsuspecting public.

At the time, I had no idea the impact this one act was going to have - on my life, on hers, on the multiverses of Amaranthe. But in the years that followed, a story about a starship pilot with dark red hair that came to me in the shower one morning (you’ve all heard that story by now) became so, so much more. Over the course of 2,227,818 words(!), 20 novels and 10 short stories, it has transformed into an epic tale of humanity (and our allies) putting aside our squabbles to rise above our deepest fears and come together to do what we must to survive, then thrive.

Amaranthe is, above all, an optimistic vision that dares to believe humanity will prove to be both stronger and better than we believe ourselves to be - and that’s the story I was driven to tell when I started typing on a keyboard ten years plus nine months ago….

It was the summer of 2013, I had no idea my life was soon to change.

To be fair, it had already changed quite a bit. I’d walked away from a successful corporate legal career to seek a better life in the mountains of Colorado. I was doing freelance coding and editing work, desperately trying to reach a tiny fraction of the lofty heights of my former law firm salary.

And all I wanted to do was write.

I’d gotten back into fiction writing after a long absence from it about two years earlier, my creative tendencies having been nudged back to life by the imaginative worlds such video games as the Mass Effect trilogy, EVE Online and The Old Republic games offered. Now I started hearing whispers of a new manner of publishing and a new breed of writer: one who eschewed the old gatekeepers in New York and London and used the power of technology to share their books with the world—and the readers—directly. Already a computer geek, my ears perked up like a dog hearing the crinkle of a cheese wrapper, and a radical thought occurred to me: I could do this. The business and technical aspects of independent publishing, that was. I still had to write a book worth reading. So I got to work.

It took me nine months to write, edit and prepare Starshine for release. I was still doing freelance work as well, because bills, but all my creative energy and free time, I threw into the book.

I sold eight copies on release day. Of course, I’d given away the book for free to everyone who had subscribed to my website, which represented the sum total of my family, friends and existing readers from my fan fiction days, so, hey - eight brand new readers! Over the next ten days, I sold between two and six copies a day. Not half bad for a brand-new indie author no one had ever heard of, who had done everything from cover design to formatting to ‘marketing’ (lol) herself, but let’s not kid ourselves. The book wasn’t lighting the world on fire.

Then I woke up the morning of April 3rd (the day after my birthday) to discover I had sold 20 copies overnight. I was elated, of course, though I had no idea the reason for the dramatic uptick in sales (to this day, I still don’t). By noon it was 74, and Starshine was #19 on the Space Opera Bestsellers list. Mere presence on such lists increases sales as a book becomes far more visible to browsing shoppers, so sales were now feeding on themselves. By the time I went to bed that night, Starshine was #4 in Space Opera and in the Top 500 of all books on Amazon. 

Fast forward ten amazing years. Starshine has been read by over 300,000 people; twenty books on, so many of you are still here, as excited for the next adventure as you were for the first. I’ve heard from countless readers about how much the series has meant to them; I’ve made wonderful new friends and been enriched by their stories. I’ve had fantastic adventures myself (admittedly, many of these still happen in my own head). My life has changed, in the best ways possible, and it’s all because of you (with a small assist from Alex and Caleb and Miriam and Nika and their wonderful friends and families). Today, perhaps more than any other day, I’m so thankful to each and every one of you. Thank you for allowing me to write for a living, and for sharing this incredible universe with me.

Here’s to the next decade!