Control: Spaceships Fighting

I, Dalton Lewis, am finishing my last draft of my novel American Starfleet Independence. I will continue to work like crazy and finish within the next week. Some novels I spend two months on — but I relax and write a reasonable amount every day, playing video games and watching television and movies and hanging out with friends and eating at semi-expensive restaurants. I relax and write a reasonable amount.

Other times — like with this book — I work hard. I work like crazy all day long, taking breaks to play a little bit of video games and watch an episode or two of a television show. Mainly I work — I write. The novel takes place around the star system which hosts the planet Geldon, a jungle planet in between the human territory and the alien tratos territory in space. Both sides fight each other in a terrible war over the territory.

I wanted many huge spaceship battles, and I used ship battles from World War II as a template for my fights. I paid attention to the naval fights from Guadalcanal in the war and tried to show battles which reflected those battles in that war. This enabled me to have huge starship battles in which the battles felt real and important and the good guys sometimes won and sometimes lost — the wins reflected the real-life battles and so did the losses.

I have a pair of women as the main characters in this one — Callie and Annie. Callie is a spaceship fighter pilot with a dark and mysterious past whereas Annie is a hard-nosed marine who fights countless tratos forces with just an LR-27 laser rifle and some body armor — and a metal knife with an electrical charge attached to it. They meet and their interactions form an arc through the story — as they learn about each other’s tragic past and try not to repeat it.

Character arcs mean something to me. I want my characters to change and grow as the story progresses. Tristan, a rich young black man, is allowed to do anything and be anyone by his parents. He chooses to be a spaceship pilot — but he learns that everyone cannot win every fight. Callie has to learn to face her dark past and visit the uberran homeworld in a terrible confrontation. This is a focal point of this book: I want them to evolve. This allows the characters to shine and the story to have a plot based on the characters and their personalities.

I also wanted to develop some interesting lore for the alien races. The tratos people have gods that take the bodies of the people in their community for short periods of time. They don’t know if they are talking to a god at any given time. The aldrins have wings of energy which allow them to fly through the heavens — and some turn this to black energy to represent a rebellion against what they are told to do. The villainous uberrans are hated and feared so much that they turn into a group of people that wants to hurt everyone else. I tried to create alien races which would make the audience impressed and would resonate with audiences over time. I didn’t want the generic fight against the bugs. That’s been done.

All in all I’m proud of this book. It’s a fun, wild military space adventure. I hope all of you try to read and enjoy it.

Thanks, and take care, friends.