Dr. Therese Blake is a homebody archaeologist devoted to the history of planet Earth. But when her sister Lissy makes a stunning discovery near an abandoned colony on a distant exoplanet, the sisters team up to discover its secrets.
Eerie, luminescent images cover the walls of an underground cavern. The glass garden looks like a payday to Lissy, who’s been struggling to turn a profit to keep her salvage crew fed and paid. Therese, however, insists on careful academic procedure. She can’t figure it out: Is the anomaly an artificial creation–or a living organism?
As the anomaly’s mystery draws the sisters into an obsessive orbit, it turns out neither greed nor science can offer protection from its relentless gravity.
I can totally write a long-form story in 500 words a day.
When I started this book, all I really had was the image of the stained-glass window and the idea that it did something bad. I didn’t know what, or why, or to whom. I certainly didn’t know how it was going to end. As someone who likes her outlines, this was worrisome.
So I decided I would try to write by the headlights, as that quote from E.L. Doctorow explains. I made up some characters, put them on a spaceship because why not, and took it from there. I found myself focusing on descriptions—kind of unusual for me.
That first draft is interesting to me now. Plot points and whole characters are introduced and slowly disappear from the narrative as I learned what was necessary and what wasn’t. The story consumed them, which is fitting, but the draft preserves their ghosts.
Anything can be inspiration.
Especially if you’re going slowly, which makes this a corollary to my first point. Did I mine my background as an Egyptologist and former professor, stuff which just happened to be lying around on the floor of my brain, as fodder for this story? Absolutely.
But I also learned to appreciate things I found my path. Literally. I make reference to a poor bunny rabbit on the sidewalk one summer afternoon, its inner workings on display between ministrations from the local birds. People ahead of me were clearly disgusted. I was fascinated. I mean, how often do you get to see a wild animal so closely? I went home and wrote a description of what I’d seen, which led my brain to make a connection, then another, and now that bunny lives on in my novella, where he is of course still quite dead.
Research is important, but confidence in what you’ve made up is key.
One of my characters is a scientist. Another is a starship engineer. I am neither of those things, though I did intern at an engineering firm in college. This helped me know where to go when the scientist needed a panoply of gear to do his job. I read up on various sensors and added them to his cart, like how it used to be my job to collate and send press releases for new products.
The engineer was a little trickier, so I did that writer thing where I make stuff up. Grounded in my own frustrations with tech, of course. I have no idea if the engine room I created lines up with those of real interstellar ships (and at this point in technology, no one does) but it was important to me writing the story that I not care. This was my ship, and my character, and together we knew all we needed to know. The best compliment I got when sharing these scenes with my writer friends was when the engineer among them told me, “The engineering feels real.”
You put ship names in italics.
As a grammar and punctuation nerd, I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t know this rule. A ship’s name is treated like the title of a long-form work. That makes perfect sense. A ship is a big story, after all, with a beginning, middle, and end. Absolutely crammed with details. It deserves the italics.
I am a horror writer.
In soliciting blurbs for this book I received an ancillary comment that stuck with me: “You write some messed-up stuff, Jessica, gotta say.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard something like this. A beloved professor reacted to my first published short story with “EWWWW!” But I never considered myself a writer of “ew,” or “messed-up.” I never considered myself a writer of horror. Dark fantasy, sure. The occasional twisted fairy tale. Is a cannibal wedding really “ew?” I hadn’t thought so. There’s a chance I was just too close to the idea; I remember Tim Gunn telling a designer, who used human hair as fringe, that the designer had been in the monkey house at the zoo for too long and didn’t notice what was obvious to newcomers.
Maybe my hesitation to take on the moniker is left over from my childhood. I can recall in great detail the pieces of media that sent me out of the TV room to cower. Even today, I come to a lot of horror through summaries on Wikipedia, and go no further. I don’t like being scared. I’m the weenie Emily C. Hughes is writing for. The idea that I create horror seemed counterintuitive. Sure, I wrote a vampire novella, but it was a tragic love story and composed in sonnets, for cryin’ out loud.
But the more I think of it, horror is a vast, varied genre, and I do love it. I love beautiful horror. I love elegant monsters in human form, non-human form, and transformations between. I love dark spaces and magic.
And I write it.
Jessica Lévai has loved stories and storytellers her whole life. After a double major in history and mathematics, a PhD in Egyptology, and eight years of the adjunct shuffle, she devoted herself to writing full-time. You can find her work at Strange Horizons, Cossmass Infinities, and Reactor Magazine. Her first novella, The Night Library of Sternendach: A Vampire Opera in Verse, won the Lord Ruthven Award for Fiction. She dreams of one day collaborating on a graphic novel, and meeting Stephen Colbert. Check out her website, JessicaLevai.com, for links and more.
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