A Universe Without End

For me, writing is all-consuming. When I’m working, I’m writing. When I’m talking to you, I’m writing. I’m writing while I’m walking, driving, hanging out with friends. While I sleep, I dream of my writing, thinking out scenes and plotlines as I’m falling asleep. If I’m awake, I’m writing.

It’s one thing to say this to someone, but quite another for them to understand it. Unless they’re equally as obsessive or consumed by something they love. But this isn’t just about a passion for something. Writing isn’t just something I do – it’s who I am, what I’m here for, the ultimate trajectory despite everything I undertake in my life. It brings me joy, makes me feel like I have a purpose, a worth. It’s the thing I’m best at and the thing through which I articulate everything about me. All my memories, my actions, my desires, fears, relationships, knowledge, interest, introspection and musing. All disguised as Science Fiction and Fantasy and incorporating the best and the worst about the world around me.

It is my personal universe.

Kiranis developed into something so different because it’s a literary microcosm of how I search for meaning in this vast universe of which I get only a glimpse. I should have been an astrophysicist – I read a lot about quantum mechanics and black holes and galactic mergers and gravitational waves, but that wasn’t who I was when I was young. I failed Physics in school, likely because I was disruptive and inattentive and afforded no value to my education back then. University was an eye-opener for me. I found myself waiting in the library and in lectures and discussions and arguments. I learned that the argumentative, anti-authoritarian person I had always been would have benefited greatly from the recognition that my passion for critical thinking needed parameters, guidance, for my arrogance to be kept in check by the ability to know when I was wrong and to learn from it.

I still struggle with who I am, and it delays my writing. The frustrating irony of always wanting to write but spending so much time procrastinating and losing myself to crippling self-doubt, impostor syndrome, and – lately – suicidal ideation threatens to sap my energy and stop me achieving the things I want. I say this not to seek sympathy – all the above contributes to characterisation and it is precisely my fear of death that informs the greater plot of Kiranis.

For all universes must end.

I empathise with my central protagonist (I say central because a space opera will invariably have many protagonists) because he is in a unique position in his universe. He knows what’s coming and he has dedicated his life to changing the outcome. I channel my fear of the inevitable into this plot precisely because, in the depths of the night, when I wake and it hits me – that knowledge, that certainty – I wish to be lost in a fantasy of options.

In a universe without end.

Tears of The Dragon (Kiranis Book 4)

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