For those of you not familiar with BattleTech, it’s the long running tabletop miniatures game, RPG, and fiction series that began in 1984. Some of you might know it as a videogame, where it flies under the brand MechWarrior, which is the exact same universe and essentially the same canon. It’s set a thousand years in the future where humanity has spread across a thousand planets and combat is done in giant BattleMechs. It’s a bit dystopian and war still pretty much sucks for everyone. In the universe, rapid modes of communication have been cut off for the last thirty years or so, making it really hard to get just about anything done.

VoidBreaker deals with that specific problem, so here’s the back cover copy of the book before I dive into my lessons learned:

A NEW ERA DAWNS!

Clan Sea Fox aims to be the leading broker of interstellar communications across the Inner Sphere, but the Blackout, the continuing malfunction of the hyperpulse generator network, has stood in their way for far too long.

To fix the broken HPG network, the Sea Foxes enlist the skills of an elite Watch operative, code name Kitefin. Her first priority is to capture the one man with the knowledge to end the Blackout and restore communication between the stars: Tucker Harwell, a genius technician who vanished amid the chaos of Terra’s conquest.

Before Kitefin can take Tucker to VoidBreaker Station to begin the work of repairing the vast HPG comms network, she’ll have to find him. Unfortunately, she’s not the only one looking for him…

Every book in a series could be someone’s first:

If all of that sounds a little overwhelming to you as someone who may well have never heard of BattleTech, I wanted to make sure I could craft a book set in a universe with this much history to it that anyone could pick up and find enjoyment in. I interviewed Max Allan Collins at one point in my journalism career and he told me that his approach when writing Batman comics in the ‘80s was to make sure that every issue could be approachable by new readers as a jumping on point. “Every comic could be someone’s first” is a quote that’s bounced around a lot, often attributed to Stan Lee, but I realized it’s just as relevant in situations like BattleTech, and this was the philosophy I decided to go into with VoidBreaker. (Indeed, I try that for all of my series work.) Since I was introducing a brand new character in a faction that hasn’t seen much screen time over the course of the franchise, it would be easy to provide enough context for new readers to ease them into the universe. The thing I realized and really learned writing this book is that it can be really hard. You don’t want to talk down to the long time readers who will instantly know all of the jargon and factions at play, and you don’t want to overload the new readers with too much exposition. Finding that balance can be difficult at times, but I found the trick was to draft in the mindset of that familiar reader and then revise from the perspective of the new reader. Every time I’d get to a point where I’d say, “Why would I know about this if I don’t know anything about the world?” I could reconfigure the scene to naturally include details or imply enough context to make it work without dumping exposition all over the place and I think it makes a better reader experience for both sets of fans; the old guard and the ones coming to the universe for the first time. Having said that, you’ll have to try it out for yourself and let me know if it worked.

Challenge yourself and try something new:

Every time I set out to write a book, I try to learn something new about my craft and try something I’ve never tried before. I try to grow and learn with every bite of the proverbial apple. I think that’s something I learned early on, but I always half-forget through the process and remember why I like doing it when I get to the final product. It’s not fun to write on auto-pilot. Giving yourself a challenge is fun, it makes the writing more interesting, and more often than not makes for a better story. My friends and writing mentor, Aaron Allston once told me at our last writing retreat before he passed away, “I’m always excited to see what new mistakes you’re going to make, Bryan.”

I was a little shocked and offended at first, but he explained it to my little newbie-self that it meant I was trying new things and growing every time and I never want to lose that spirit. For this book, I wanted to stretch into story styles and genres I’d never tried before, and work with structures that were novel to me. I think it came off pretty well and I learned a thing or two about how to craft a story, I think.

Read what inspires you, but also outside your comfort zone:

Stephen King once said (yes, that Stephen King, not some other random Stephen King), “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.” And I take that really seriously. I read a lot, especially when I’m writing a book. This book in particular took a lot of inspiration from Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, so I was reading them as I worked to keep that fire of inspiration burning. But I was also reading a lot of stuff as I wrote outside that comfort zone of inspiration, looking to books I wouldn’t normally be reading, looking for outside perspectives and different modes of thinking. The polar opposite of what I was working on. While I was binging Ian Fleming on one hand, I was also reading things like Balzac’s Colonel Chabert and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and contemporary stuff, too. Stuff by Hailey Piper or N.K. Jemison or Gabino Iglesias or Delilah Dawson. I even sneak in a romance novel here or there. They’re not usually my thing, but they handle character development in ways that we can all learn from. Seriously, has anyone here read Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown? It’s a stunning romance fantasy and I learned so much reading it. It’s just terrific and everyone should read it.

Imagine more.

BattleTech is set a thousand years in the future and it blends so many societies and different modes of thinking of humanity. Yes, there has been a backslide in humanity and it’s also a militaristic view of science fiction, but I had to remind myself constantly to think bigger about how things could have changed and what bold things I could do with not just technology, but the people and societies and planets. What would they honestly look like? Some of them might be better than we have now, some of them might be worse. What things would we have transcended? What things would we still struggle with. I was constantly challenging myself to imagine more and imagine better. And that’s something I think I still need to learn and work on and remind myself of. As I’m working in science fiction, I need to imagine more. I’m going to keep working on this as I continue to work in BattleTech and other sci-fi spaces. I’m going to keep working at thinking bigger and bolder. And I’m going to try to think in ways that might show us what a better future might look like in ways that might offer artistic rebellions we can learn from now.

Ignore the noise:

No piece of art is universally beloved and there will always be naysayers. And if anyone hasn’t noticed, there are folks invested in so called culture wars in order to… I don’t even know, drum up YouTube clicks and fight battles that don’t need fighting. BattleTech isn’t immune to this. They’ve been making rounds in every franchise from Star Wars and Star Trek to BattleTech and Shadowrun and anything else you can think of. They get angry if there is the slightest hint of representation or anything outside of the way things were 40 years ago.

I’ve learned it’s not my responsibility to listen to the noise or engage with it in any way.

My responsibility is to tell the best story possible and not worry about the rest of it. Kurt Vonnegut said that you need to “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” For me, I know who that one person is—admittedly, it’s like five people—but still. The point remains. Most of them are editors and the people I work for creatively. I want them to be happy and I want to be happy, too. I’ve had to learn to not be concerned about the reviews. Yes, I want the fans to be happy, but if the people I’m pleasing are happy, enough of the fans will be happy that I’ll be just fine.

Worrying about more than that is a good way to give myself a panic attack and I don’t need that. Nothing is really worth that.

And that’s a lesson worth taking to the bank.

Bryan Young (he/they) works across many different media. His work as a writer and producer has been called “filmmaking gold” by The New York Times. He’s also published comic books with Slave Labor Graphics and Image Comics. He’s been a regular contributor for the Huffington Post, StarWars.com, Star Wars Insider magazine, SYFY, /Film, and was the founder and editor in chief of the geek news and review site Big Shiny Robot! In 2014, he wrote the critically acclaimed history book, A Children’s Illustrated History of Presidential Assassination. He co-authored Robotech: The Macross Saga RPG and has written five books in the BattleTech Universe: Honor’s Gauntlet, A Question of Survival, Fox Tales, Without Question, and the forthcoming VoidBreaker. His latest non-fiction tie-in book, The Big Bang Theory Book of Lists is a #1 Bestseller on Amazon. His work has won two Diamond Quill awards and in 2023 he was named Writer of the Year by the League of Utah Writers. He teaches writing for Writer’s Digest, Script Magazine, and at the University of Utah. Follow him across social media @swankmotron or visit swankmotron.com.

Bryan Young: Website

Voidbreaker: Books2Read | Signed copy direct from author