Glynn recently had the chance to talk to Justin Sloan on the Creative Writing Career Podcast, which is dedicated to people who want to make writing more than just a hobby. Here’s your chance to get behind the scenes on the Starship’s Mage Universe and learn about how August’s breakout success Heart of Vengeance got started. As Justin says about writers in the interview: “Many of us are fans first!”
Below are a few of the top tidbits and quotes from the August 28 interview – for more on reading, writing, and self-publishing, you can:
Listen to the podcast (33 minutes)
Read the transcript (6,100 words)
The Highlights
On the future of the Starship’s Mage universe
Justin: So, are any of your series complete? As in, you’re in the final book in any of the series and you’ll never have another one?
Glynn: Technically, the Starship’s Mage series is complete.
Justin: Okay.
Glynn: Technically. But it’s complicated.
Justin: Yeah, like if we bribed you enough money right now, you might consider …
Glynn: Well, no, the original Starship’s Mage arc covers a specific series of events from, basically, Damien Montgomery getting dragged into galactic politics to galactic politics exploding in everybody’s face.
Justin: Yeah.
Glynn: The aftermath of galactic politics exploding in everybody’s face is a different series. But it’s still continuing Damien Montgomery’s story. So there will be a Starship’s Mage: UnArcana Rebellions series, which is a sequel series to the Starship’s Mage series.
Justin: But you’re not gonna list them on Amazon in the same series page?
Glynn: Probably not, no, because they’re intended to be… someone should be able to pick up the first book of that series and not need to have read Starship’s Mage.
On a new Starship’s Mage trilogy
And there’s a side series I’m writing right now based on some of the characters from the first book that is the same: someone should be able to pick Interstellar Mage, book one of the Red Falcon series, and not need to have read the Starship’s Mage series for it to make sense.
On the inspirations behind Starship’s Mage
It’s always hard, coming back from four years later, to go, “Where did this concept come from?” Because it started as a short story I wrote, and I think it was in response to the page on TV tropes on A Wizard Did It, where you’re basically hand-waving so much stuff it may as well just be magic.
So I wrote a short story where a ship was propelled through space by magic. And my agent at the time asked me to see if I could expand it and I kind of waffled on it because I really didn’t have, at that point, any faith in doing anything, really, in terms of publishing. And then my wife, who offered to do cover art for it, talked me into doing the series of novellas that became Starship’s Mage. She would do the cover art for them, and we could self-publish them. It seems to have worked now.
Vigilante
On collaboration and the Vigilante Project:
Justin: I’d love to hear about Heart of Vengeance and how this collaboration started. I could check real quick and see if you’ve done other collaborations, but I’d love to hear if you have.
Glynn: No, Heart of Vengeance is the first time I’ve ever collaborated with anybody. So basically, Heart of Vengeance is the first half of a novel I wrote when I was 20. It was a book that always needed to be two novels, and that was basically the issue with it in its original state. So I spent years planning to go back and rewrite it into two novels, realized I was never actually going to get around to it. I’d done some rewriting of pieces of it and it was no longer the book I’d written when I was 19. But still, it really needed to be two books.
I reached out to Terry Mixon and asked him if he wanted to take on the task of taking this book and turning it into two books. And he and I bounced an outline back and forth for several weeks while we kind of nailed down what we wanted to do. And then he took off, starting from the first thirty [to] forty thousand words that I had written and revised, and rewritten, and then he wrote the rest of what became Heart of Vengeance. And then we bounced that back and forth for a series of revisions and ended up with the final product, which I’m actually really pleased with. I think it is a distinctly different book than either of us would have written on our own.
Castle Federation
On Castle Federation and doing something just a little different:
Justin: Okay, cool. Yeah, you kind of like to take these ideas and not just follow the tropes. Am I wrong in saying that?
Glynn: No. Not at all. Tropes have their purpose. They’re useful tools, but you don’t want to build an entire … You don’t want to build a house out of LEGO. LEGO might make a useful accent feature over here, but you don’t want to build your house out of LEGO.
Justin: Yeah. I see a lot of these people who are trying to just jump on board with these series, these genres that are doing well.
Glynn: Yeah.
Justin: But then it does seem like they are, like you said, building a house out of the LEGOs. I was just looking at your sci-fi covers that are like the spaceship ones. So like on your [series] Duchy of Terra, would you say those are pretty stereotypical, like standard sci-fi? Or is there something weird about those that kind of separates them like the mages in Starship’s Mage?
Glynn: Duchy of Terra and Castle Federation are significantly more regular sci-fi. There’s definitely things going on in both that are non-standard, that are different takes on the universe, and so on and so forth, but they’re definitely a bit closer to the mainstream of space opera than Starship’s Mage is.
Justin: If I was to ask you what the hook is of Space Carrier Avalon …
Glynn: Space Carrier Avalon was an attempt to do hard-science fiction space fighters, basically.
Justin: Space fighters? What does that mean, space fighters?
Glynn: So, like the starfighters in Star Wars, the X-wings and that kind of thing, it was an attempt to actually build a setting where, from an economic perspective, something that doesn’t necessarily make sense from a pure physics or technological perspective, made sense.
Justin: Oh, okay.
Glynn: So a lot of the parameters of the setting are structured around it being logically and necessary for them to have carriers swanning around, launching hundreds of starfighters at each other.
On where to start reading Glynn’s work:
I would say, if you want something unique, go to Starship’s Mage, but understand that it is my first published novel and it does have a bit of the issue with serialization. If you want to see my craft at its best, and the story I love the most, start with The Terran Privateer and go through that trilogy.
I read _Starship’s Mage_ because it looked the most promising of the titles offered in a trial of Kindle Unlimited. Now I am hooked. I binge-read the rest of that series, including Interstellar Mage trilogy, and the Exile series, and Duchy of Terra series, and am now on Castle series. It is fun to pick up the allusions to other works.