Read the Transcript of Glynn’s Conviction Q&A

INTRODUCTION

Hello everyone, and welcome to the question and answer session for the launch of Conviction, the first novel in the Scattered Stars Universe, and also the first novel in the Scattered Stars: Conviction trilogy.

As usual, I will be reading from Conviction itself to kick things off while people drift on, but let’s get the introductions out of the way. If you’re watching this, I’m relatively sure you know who I am—that seems egotistical to say, but it’s true. But I’m Glynn Stewart, I am the author of Starship’s Mage, Castle Federation, a number of other universes, I’ve lost count. Currently, ongoing universes are Starship’s Mage, Duchy of Terra, Peacekeepers of Sol, and now, let me get this in camera view, Scattered Stars: Conviction, which is intended to be a trilogy, and there was a question around books and universe overall coming up later.

Without further ado, while we wait for more people to sign on, I’ll put on a horrible fake British accent for a moment, and then we’ll get started with chapter eight, because chapter one is funny, but that’s all it’s got going for it. It’s got more going for it than that, but it doesn’t make a good reading.

READING

Click here to read an excerpt from the book

Conviction is my newest release, obviously. It launched this Tuesday and it is the first in a trilogy. The second book is Deception and the third book is Equilibrium. Excuse me. If you’ve read the book, you could probably guess where the third title comes from. The second one has its own sources that will come up in the end. Conviction is the name of the carrier that Kira Demirci and her companions end up on, and it’s also a virtue that comes up a bunch in the book let’s say.

The Scattered Stars universe itself is kind of my new playground. My intent is to write several series in the space so we’ll see how that goes. I’ve set up an interesting set of dynamics there, I believe, that should be lending itself to a number of stories. Now I have five questions that were posted on Facebook, potentially six and then one more we picked up from the comments that was in there. Five, sorry. Five questions that were posted to the form and one that was posted to Facebook. So there’s six questions to answer. Anyone who wants to throw something in the comments, I will happily answer that if it comes up before I fall over in exhaustion. It’s been a long week. 

Q&A

Q1: Is there a male lead opposite Kira?

The first question I have is directly regarding Conviction and is the only question here directly regarding Conviction. Bad audience. The question comes from Merrylee Lanehart asking if there is a male lead in the story opposite Kira.

Now, I’m not a hundred percent sure how this question was meant Merrylee. I’ll admit that right upfront. I’m guessing that you’re asking more is there a male ro…is there a romantic interest in the book? Yes. Is there a male main character? No. Kira Demirci is the sole point of view character, the sole main character of the book. There are a number of men in her immediate circle including her pilots and the crew of the Conviction, and there is a romance arc in the story, if that’s what you’re asking. The number of reviews complaining about that entertains me, but there it is and yeah, there is no male lead. There are a number of important male characters including a love interest counterpart for Kira Demirci. 

Q2: When is the next book in the Scattered Stars: Conviction trilogy due out?

The next question I have comes from Carl Rumbolo. I’m not sure how to pronounce your last name, Carl. I apologize if I’ve got it wrong.

Carl asks when the next book in the series is due out. Deception is due out in July. I haven’t written it yet. It’s three, it’s the third book on my docket right now. I’m not a hundred percent sure of where it falls in my order [of books I’m about to write]. I know it’s not my current book. Obviously. I don’t believe it’s the next one up either. Which will mean it’s third or fourth and I think it’s third. 

Q3: How many books are planned for Scattered Stars?

Then I have a question from Jeff asking how many books are currently planned in the universe? Infinity and beyond! Currently, the Scattered Stars: Conviction trilogy is targeted at three books. I have two other stories that I definitely want to tell in this setting and at least two more that have been rattling around my head for a while that could fit neatly into this setting. So, I’ll probably work on them as well. I would probably attempt to work them into the Scattered Stars setting as well. Depending on how things break down that’s somewhere between probably four to eight books.

Some of them will be standalone books. Some of them will be duologies, potential trilogies. Depending on what comes out when I actually sit down and turn my two paragraph, please get this idea out of my head into an actual story arc outline. 

Q4: How do you decide on new technology for new universes?

Someone else asked: this is a new universe, how do you decide what the technology level will be and what type of FTL [Faster-than-light] technology to create? That’s from Philip. I actually did an entire panel on this at ConFusion two weeks ago now… a week ago now. My sense of time is not great these days. I, I am an author, I don’t have a day job. So, my sense of time is fucked.

But, so a lot of it boils down to always the questions for technology and what type of FTL boil down to the story I wanted to tell. So I was trying to set up with Scattered Stars, a setting that while not being too far all over the place, still sets up for a lot more classic adventure stories. So for those of you who’ve read the book, there’s a mention in there of like the Solar Federation Marshals. They’re these Interpol officers with significant authority inside the Solar Federation and quite a bit outside. I’m going to write one of their stories. So I kind of needed to know and have an idea of what that tech boiled down to. A lot of this one. So this question was Philip, I think I said that. 

Q5: What made you decide to do a series around starfighters, and why are they so rare?

And it also feeds into the next question at this point that Juliet asks, what made me decide to series around starfighters and why they’re so rare in Scattered Stars? So I kind of take the series with starfighters, and technology question together cause they do kind of go together. Scattered Stars was set up to be a classic space opera setting.

It’s not really a generic science fiction setting so much, but it was set up to enable a universe where I could tell a lot of different stories without having to change the rules. And I do keep having, each of my stories, universes has a different set of rules and sometimes that’s necessary for the story I set out to tell and sometimes it’s not. So what I’m testing with Scattered Stars is setting a baseline set of rules that I am using for a number of stories. We’ll see how it goes. You might all decide that you hate it and I won’t write very many books if they don’t sell. That’s just the nature of the game. 

Then someone’s asking why the—Julia again still was asking why starfighters are still so rare in Scattered Stars. They’re not. Where the story takes place they’re rare. The Syntactic Cluster is, let’s put it this way, if we’re looking at Earth politics, the Syntactic Cluster is somewhere beneath Zimbabwe in terms of development and technological capability.

The entire region is so backwards, we don’t have a comparable setting. If we were, if we’re talking about Earth, I’m dealing with a whole lot of really deep…for me to focus on Earth and the Scattered Stars series, we’re well into true transhumanism. There’s some of that going on in the Syntactic Cluster. Everyone has, has hardware in their head and that kind of thing, but people on Earth can have their brains uploaded, like your personality can be uploaded. At death. It’s not, it’s a one time…it’s kind of an inherently fatal process, so they don’t do it. It’s not the perfect process you see in a lot of transhumanist fiction. You know there’s a lot of things going on on Earth, that the Syntactic Cluster has no concept…that would be magic to Redward, let alone to us. You’re, you’ve got a 1500 light year gap and you’re talking, I think, I think I’ve mentioned in the book that it’s about two and a half years, maybe three years, flight from Earth to Redward.

So they’re…Nova fighters are rare in the Syntactic Cluster and that’s because the Syntactic Cluster is a bunch of 10th rate powers. Apollo who, which is where Kira comes from, is a sixth, seventh rate power and they’ve got a fleet of carriers, more ships and hundreds of fighters, not thousands. I mean there are something, they’ve basically got an equivalent probably air fleet, roughly what the United States has today. So they’ve got several, they’ve got a thousand-ish planes, they’ve got six to seven carriers, that type of thing.

But as you go closer into the core, Nova fighters become more, more common. Nova warships in general become more common. The cruisers that are Apollo and Brisingr’s heaviest ships are toys to the Solar Federation. They’re small, they’re obsolete, they’re slow. But the Solar Federation is still 1300 light years away from Apollo-Brisinger Sector. While they’re rare in the area of this particular story takes place. They’re not rare overall and that’s one of the things I like about how I set up the setting is because it’s so spread out. I have so many options for different ways to work. The, the fringe, the rim, the periphery, the meridian, heart, the core, they all have very different tech levels and very different politics and that drives a lot of the, not necessarily conflict but a lot of the setting parameters for Scattered Stars.

I have one question from my document over here. I’m going to come back to, because it’s completely nothing to do with Scattered Stars. I am going to answer it but I’ll be coming back to it because Ivo has asked on the chat if there’ll be more involvement from Apollo or, coreward world tells me that you’re not very far in the book.

There’s a lot of stuff even in Conviction itself, more central powers dicking with Syntactic Cluster and that’s going to be a lot of the underlying stuff of the Conviction trilogy, is Kira Demirci and the friends she makes in the back of the nowhere dealing with how the politics of the inner worlds spillover onto the outer systems. No, someone wants, there is no proxy wars necessarily going on out there yet, but there’s definitely some stuff that’s spilling outwards and causing people problems.

PATREON AND RELICS OF ETERNITY

Sorry, I’m looking at event logs on here and one of them is from the last Q&A. The last, last question I have here, unless someone wants to throw something into the Q&A still. I’ve got a question from Jayant Bhavsar. That’s not me mispronouncing your name. That’s me failing to produce the noises I want to produce. Bhavsar. I think that’s correct. Asking what the, what is the storyline for Relics of Eternity? For those of you who haven’t been paying attention to my babbling elsewhere, Relics of Eternity is the first book of the new Duchy of Terra trilogy. It’s what I am, I’m about 40% done it right now and I’m just bringing up the file so I can tell you when it’s due out. Relics of Eternity is targeted for release at the end of April, so there’ll be a pre-order up probably mid April and it’ll be available on Patreon, the Patreons will get it in mid April.

This is my opportunity to plug Patreon. [Patrons] will get a copy of the book two weeks before it comes out. That does end up, with something like Conviction that ended up being a 25% premium, which wasn’t intended just because normally all of my first in series are four dollars. I don’t see us having another first in series for a while. In fact, of the next first in series I had on my schedule are now all out. The next first and series I have on here is not until August of next year, so we’re not going to see much come up. You’re not going to see anything where you’re paying a significant premium using the Patreon until then. It’s a pre-order platform as far as we are concerned. Don’t feel that you need to go on there to support us or anything. Its major purpose is to allow people who are not Amazon readers to get the book.

Right now, all of our books are going into Kindle Unlimited will be for the foreseeable future, but the exclusivity period for Kindle Unlimited begins with launches and the Patreon is an availability before the the book launches. So kick in five bucks U.S, you get the book two weeks before launch is basically how we’re running this. It’s actually the same time as our existing volunteer ARC team, but the volunteer ARC team is expected to give reviews and the Patreons are not because they’ve already paid for the book. In terms of the actual question, sorry, I got distracted. What of the storyline? Obviously I don’t want to go into that in too much depth. I’m 40,000 words into the book, so less than half done, but basically Relics of Eternity picks up about 12 years later, with Morgan in command of an Imperium warship, a long bloody way away from Earth because she really doesn’t want to be under her mother’s shadow anymore. And they’re digging into Precursor shit because the Mesharom been gone for 10 years. No one’s seen one of the caterpillars for a decade and they’ve got the complete Mesharom archives on the Precursors.

So they’re poking up the edges going, okay, well here’s what the, Mesharom, here’s this area where the Mesharom data doesn’t look complete, but it looks interesting. So let’s go take a look and poking at the artifacts of ancient super advanced civilization—technology you don’t understand—is what we want to politely call a bad idea. And that’s, and that’s if you’re the first ones to get there. That is basically Relics of Eternity in the Shadow of Terra trilogy is about how the A!Tol Imperium and Morgan Casimir are dealing with what the Precursors left behind and trying to both use it for the benefit of the Imperium and not actually screw themselves up more than anything. I will say this, it’s seven books into the series and I think I’m actually going to fire a star killer.

I’ve written six books in the series and I think they’ve shown up, star killers have been mentioned in at least five of them, but they haven’t been fired yet. So that’s something to look forward to that for some of you I think. But that is what I’m about, all I really want able or willing to say on Relics of Eternity front, unless someone’s got any new questions in here, I think that might make this one of our shortest Q&As yet.

CLOSING REMARKS

These are, we are having something of a problem coming up with questions for these so I don’t know. At the current rate we’re barely, we’re, what we’re getting is about kind of the minimum I’m wanting to keep doing these for, so I can sometimes I can chunter on for 20 minutes, sometimes like without questions. Today’s not going to be one of those days. But do keep in mind that if you want me to keep doing these, throwing questions up when we post the form is the best way to do so. So as long as we’re getting questions, I’m going to come and answer them. But if it starts to look like we’re only getting one or two questions a time, I’m just going to start answering them on the Facebook page or in the reader’s group. I’m not going to answer them here. This is quite a bit of effort for me.

I don’t like how I look on camera. So any case, and I had to babble on to try and get people time for more questions, but I am not seeing any. So I am going to log off. I wish everybody a… god I was going to say, my brain decided to try and say, happy Brexit day, which is the most ridiculous thing to ever cross my brain. I hope everybody has a good weekend. That sounds far happier. So I will be back for one of these for Mountain of Mars in March. I won’t be doing one for the Castle Federation novella. We do have a novella launching in mid February. In that year—in that universe A prequel novel entitled A Question of Faith, and then after that is Mountain of Mars, next Damien Montgomery adventure where I don’t kill him. I promise. I was tempted, but I promise you that. I will see you in a couple months.