A whole lot of my stories take place in this universe. For a very large part of my life it’s been my perpetual work in progress (I often refer to my PWIP, and this is what I mean).
Before I figured out I could be a writer of fiction (my first dream after “cowgirl” was to be a newspaper reporter), I daydreamed as a soothing hobby. I told myself stories to stave off boredom or occupy my brain so I wasn’t so scared of the dark going to sleep. And the stories I told were the proto-tales of the Janus universe.
I wrote lots of things as a teen, and was pretty obsessed with them, but it wasn’t until I was in university that I tried to find ways to package them into digestible novels or short stories for other people. Before that it was like a never-ending space opera.
Janus has had its repeating characters. Tons of them. The oldest are Dapri and Tiplil, Tavi and Ross. When I created them, I was still fairly young, so they have a romantic tinge to them. Oh, the melodrama!
My first real “hero” character was Carol, a kind of space cop with a serious amnesia glitch. She was crass and bold, and maybe a little quick to violence. I was growing as a person and a writer. Early Carol was a bit shallow, later she had more complexity. Still, she was a saviour figure, sarcastically wise and physically triumphant in the early stories. Later I was able to see her having shortfalls and outright flaws.
The next main character was Carol’s daughter Silver, a spaceship captain and adventurer in the deepest reaches of the universe. And she was pretty much the polar opposite of her mom. Criminal, sensitive and relentlessly non-violent. They did not get along. With Silver came an explosion of stories. I have thousands upon thousands of pages that describe her adventures. Her exploits are where most of my world building grew from.
In order to write about Silver’s world, I developed research interests in physics, astrophysics, mechanical engineering, architecture, biology, sociology, genealogy, and history. My home library has a lot of reference books that came in because I needed to understand something Silver acquired, fought, waded through, or needed.
When her son died…and then returned in skeletal form, I delved into anatomy and focussed on bones. I have a reputation now for being into skeletons. Okay, and I do, but the reason I do, and the reason I have so many books, bones (nothing illegal calm down), and art is because of researching his 206 piece composition.
Check out Sical’s tale
Bones of the Magus
Bones of the Magus was picked up by a literary press and published in 2011. They wanted it because it was (in their words) avant-garde. I was playing around with typography quite a bit, something I very much enjoy.
Honestly, I wrote Bones because I thought it was the simplest, most understandable introduction to the big weird universe that Janus occupies. I didn’t have to introduce his whole family or much of the history that made up his backstory. Like all things I make, though, it’s got layers.