Judith Moffitt's Blog - Posts Tagged "tothebitterend"
Upcoming Book Announcement
I have finished The Coup Trilogy and the third book is up for pre-sale (well the ebook is, they don't appear to allow me to pre-sell the paperbacks.)
Rising From the Ashes
I want to talk a bit about The Coup and what I was intending when I wrote it.
It started out as a little thing, as so many things do. Just a 500-word fan fic for a little known (at the time) TV show called Firefly. Then, that expanded to 2500 words.
By the end of it I had a novel idea, but I didn't want to spend time writing a novel that couldn't be published. So I changed the universe to my own, and the story evolved from my original conception.
I started to write, but I was working full-time and somehow it was hard to find the time to concentrate. That was in 2003. In 2018, I retired and decided I would finish it. I published the first book in 2020.
As I wrote, I realized I had three books. Book one would be the origin story. How the war came to happen. Book two would be the story of the war itself. And book three would be the aftermath. Most people only do a chapter or two on aftermath, if they write about it at all. But my background makes me especially interested in aftermath, so it got a whole book. Little did I realize how difficult that might be. It wasn't that I didn't have plenty to say; but aftermaths are messy, they don't follow the regular story structure. Instead of coming together to deal with a major event, they split apart to take up their lives again. The third book turned out to be the most difficult to write.
The whole series is epic in scope. It wasn’t intended to be. But the story wants to be what the story wants to be. One of the many lessons I have learned while writing this. And I have always been a complex thinker. I suppose it shouldn’t have been so much of a surprise that I would want to tell a complex story.
I could have written this as straight up action adventure with epic space battle after epic space battle. It would have been a much shorter story. Maybe even one book. But I find those stories tedious and dull. I needed more.
So it evolved into a study of the personal impact of war. That seems an odd choice for subject matter for someone who didn't serve inn the military. But my father was a doctor in a MASH unit in Korea and the love of my life was a retired Naval Officer who served in Vietnam. Almost all of my childhood friends had fathers who had served and mothers who had dealt with World War II on the homefront. My whole generation was born in aftermath. I also worked for the military as a civilian analyst, and, probably most critical, I grew up on the grounds of a VA hospital where I saw the aftermath of war every day.
And while my subject matter sounds a bit gloomy, in the end, it is a story about hope and resilience. Along the way, we encounter heroism, grief, love, teenage angst, laughter, and surprises. Some characters make terrible mistakes. And everybody grows and changes in different ways, even the artificial intelligences and aliens.
It’s not a safe universe. But if the last year has taught us anything, it is that the universe is not safe. It never has been. We just occasionally get a chance to ignore that for a little while.
We all have favorite characters and authors are no exception. My favorite character is Garret which is surprising since we first encounter him in To the Bitter End doing something stupid. His mistake has an impact far beyond what he could have imagined. His arc is about how he recovers from that mistake and learns as he grows up. Gelb is another favorite character, so much so that he is going to get his own book. An alien exiled from his people for, as he puts it, the crime of being different, Gelb is, like so many of us, looking to find a family when he didn't fit in at home.
My favorite moment is a very human one. A couple separated by the war manages to meet up for the first time in years while both their ships are being repaired. They take a vacation, the first one ever for their children. Just an ordinary, loving family where the parents are trans. I choose a trans couple for this part of the story because I know trans people, and they want what most people want. Ordinary lives. They want love, family, and friends; have ambitions and hopes and dreams. Just like everyone else. So much of what is written about them seems to forget this. They are too often demonized, but they are not demons. They feel the same sadness at the separation due to the war, the same fears that the military person might get hurt or die, the same regret that their children don't know their father as well as they would in ordinary times. And the same joy at a moment of reunion.
There are people who will be mad about this. Why can't I write a regular cis couple instead, why do I have to be so politically correct? But I write it because there are billions of stories about cis couples and trans couple exist and deserve to have positive stories told as well. Stories that only include cis white Christians are the politically correct ones. Other people exist and it is not right to erase them so you can stay comfortable in your bubble. They say to write about what you know. I’m not trans, but I have felt invisible and erased. I have been demonized (not as much or in exactly the same way as a trans person). I write from a feeling of empathy, from knowing that all kinds of people need to show up in stories because they exist in real life. I think of some books which hit me like a ton of bricks because I finally felt seen and how important that was to me. I hope someday someone will read one of my books and say, “Yes. She gets me.”
Hopefully, some of this will have sparked your interest in my trilogy. If you haven't read the earlier books, you can find them here:
The Coup Series
Rising From the Ashes
I want to talk a bit about The Coup and what I was intending when I wrote it.
It started out as a little thing, as so many things do. Just a 500-word fan fic for a little known (at the time) TV show called Firefly. Then, that expanded to 2500 words.
By the end of it I had a novel idea, but I didn't want to spend time writing a novel that couldn't be published. So I changed the universe to my own, and the story evolved from my original conception.
I started to write, but I was working full-time and somehow it was hard to find the time to concentrate. That was in 2003. In 2018, I retired and decided I would finish it. I published the first book in 2020.
As I wrote, I realized I had three books. Book one would be the origin story. How the war came to happen. Book two would be the story of the war itself. And book three would be the aftermath. Most people only do a chapter or two on aftermath, if they write about it at all. But my background makes me especially interested in aftermath, so it got a whole book. Little did I realize how difficult that might be. It wasn't that I didn't have plenty to say; but aftermaths are messy, they don't follow the regular story structure. Instead of coming together to deal with a major event, they split apart to take up their lives again. The third book turned out to be the most difficult to write.
The whole series is epic in scope. It wasn’t intended to be. But the story wants to be what the story wants to be. One of the many lessons I have learned while writing this. And I have always been a complex thinker. I suppose it shouldn’t have been so much of a surprise that I would want to tell a complex story.
I could have written this as straight up action adventure with epic space battle after epic space battle. It would have been a much shorter story. Maybe even one book. But I find those stories tedious and dull. I needed more.
So it evolved into a study of the personal impact of war. That seems an odd choice for subject matter for someone who didn't serve inn the military. But my father was a doctor in a MASH unit in Korea and the love of my life was a retired Naval Officer who served in Vietnam. Almost all of my childhood friends had fathers who had served and mothers who had dealt with World War II on the homefront. My whole generation was born in aftermath. I also worked for the military as a civilian analyst, and, probably most critical, I grew up on the grounds of a VA hospital where I saw the aftermath of war every day.
And while my subject matter sounds a bit gloomy, in the end, it is a story about hope and resilience. Along the way, we encounter heroism, grief, love, teenage angst, laughter, and surprises. Some characters make terrible mistakes. And everybody grows and changes in different ways, even the artificial intelligences and aliens.
It’s not a safe universe. But if the last year has taught us anything, it is that the universe is not safe. It never has been. We just occasionally get a chance to ignore that for a little while.
We all have favorite characters and authors are no exception. My favorite character is Garret which is surprising since we first encounter him in To the Bitter End doing something stupid. His mistake has an impact far beyond what he could have imagined. His arc is about how he recovers from that mistake and learns as he grows up. Gelb is another favorite character, so much so that he is going to get his own book. An alien exiled from his people for, as he puts it, the crime of being different, Gelb is, like so many of us, looking to find a family when he didn't fit in at home.
My favorite moment is a very human one. A couple separated by the war manages to meet up for the first time in years while both their ships are being repaired. They take a vacation, the first one ever for their children. Just an ordinary, loving family where the parents are trans. I choose a trans couple for this part of the story because I know trans people, and they want what most people want. Ordinary lives. They want love, family, and friends; have ambitions and hopes and dreams. Just like everyone else. So much of what is written about them seems to forget this. They are too often demonized, but they are not demons. They feel the same sadness at the separation due to the war, the same fears that the military person might get hurt or die, the same regret that their children don't know their father as well as they would in ordinary times. And the same joy at a moment of reunion.
There are people who will be mad about this. Why can't I write a regular cis couple instead, why do I have to be so politically correct? But I write it because there are billions of stories about cis couples and trans couple exist and deserve to have positive stories told as well. Stories that only include cis white Christians are the politically correct ones. Other people exist and it is not right to erase them so you can stay comfortable in your bubble. They say to write about what you know. I’m not trans, but I have felt invisible and erased. I have been demonized (not as much or in exactly the same way as a trans person). I write from a feeling of empathy, from knowing that all kinds of people need to show up in stories because they exist in real life. I think of some books which hit me like a ton of bricks because I finally felt seen and how important that was to me. I hope someday someone will read one of my books and say, “Yes. She gets me.”
Hopefully, some of this will have sparked your interest in my trilogy. If you haven't read the earlier books, you can find them here:
The Coup Series
