I don’t think I set out to write strong women in positions of power, though. I just don’t default to putting men there. More important to me is writing characters who are compassionate—friends helping each other, regardless of whether they’re men, women, or non-binary. The respect that characters have (or don’t) for each other is based on their words and their actions, not their gender. The power that my characters gain (or lose) is based on their ability to convince others they should have it (or the magic they use to seize control of it).
So, I wouldn’t say that writing strong women is important to me. It just happens as a natural course of my writing.
There are plenty of books with the men being strong and powerful, with women as prizes to be won or afterthoughts to paint a scene. The lovely thing is that I can write what I write, and I’ll find readers who enjoy it, and those authors who prefer to write like Heinlein or Bradbury or Card can keep writing that to please their audiences. There are books for everyone—thankfully, these days there are even books for the people who have been historically underserved or ignored entirely. Now we just need the publishers to support the new, diverse content (from diverse authors) that we’ve sorely lacked as much as they support what you might call “classic” genre fiction. Thankfully I think strong women are covered pretty well these days, but we still have work to do on getting published works to reflect the real world in terms of disabled, cultural, racial, gender, and sexual identities.
“What feeling do you want people to come away with after reading this book?”
Flotsam, for me, is all about the relationships of the found family aboard Wind Sabre. Yes, it’s an escapist romp on a magical secondary world, and yes, it’s also got commentary on xenophobia and racism and those who try to claim power over others, but the book would be nothing without the friendships between the main characters. Worrying about them is the thread that pulls you from start to finish in this series.
To that end, if I can make you care about the crew of Wind Sabre and what happens to them next, I will be a very happy writer. Flotsam does end on a bit of a cliffhanger, and I’ve gotten some criticism for that, but I like to think it’s because my readers need to know what happens to Talis and those who travel with her. And I’m very happy that in 2022, I’ll be releasing the entire trilogy, including the previously unreleased third book, Cast Off. So, the wait will be short, and the story will finally be complete.
The other feelings I’d like my readers to come away with are fun and wonder. After all, it’s a genre-straddling airship adventure with an alien first contact and magical MacGuffins, where just about everything, from flora to fauna, either glows, wants to eat you, or both. I had a lot of fun with the world-building, and I hope my readers have fun exploring this rule-breaking planet with the characters that inhabit it, visit it, or try to destroy it.
“Will we see more of Hankirk in future books? (And will Talis ever just shoot him?)”
Ah, yes. Hankirk. The jerk everyone loves to hate. I’ve been made aware there’s even a “We Hate Hankirk” club, and I’ll just say that he’s earned it.
Well, depending on how much you love to hate him, I am either going to delight or disappoint you when I say that the imperial blow-hard that keeps showing up whenever Talis thinks she’s caught a break will return in the following books to keep doing what he does best: thinking he’s a major player when he’s really a major pain. Though he has at least figured out after Flotsam that he’s allied with poor bedfellows, so you’ll see him causing trouble in whole new ways. Yay?
As to whether Talis will ever work herself up to shooting him, you’ll have to read the series to find out. Because she definitely owes him a world of hurt. But I will tell you that, after hearing that he gets under my readers’ collars almost as much as he gets under Talis’s, I really let myself have fun making him miserable in Cast Off.
Flotsam, Book One of the Peridot Shift, Second Edition, is available now in digital and print from your favorite indie bookseller or online retailer.
Captain Talis just wants to keep her airship crew from starving, and maybe scrape up enough cash for some badly needed repairs. When an anonymous client offers a small fortune to root through a pile of atmospheric wreckage, it seems like an easy payday. The job yields an ancient ring, a forbidden secret, and a host of deadly enemies.
Now on the run from cultists with powerful allies, Talis needs to unload the ring as quickly as possible. Her desperate search for a buyer and the fallout from her discovery leads to a planetary battle between a secret society, alien forces, and even the gods themselves.
Talis and her crew have just one desperate chance to make things right before their potential big score destroys them all.
Warnings: genocide plots, bigotry, racism, classism, obsessive ex-lover, violence, gore, grief and loss, religious dogma, law breaking, manipulation, hostage situations, claustrophobia, anxiety, frustration, guilt, lies and deception, betrayal
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About the Series:
On a planet cracked open by ancient magic, outlaws and pirates are the only ones with what it takes to save Peridot from its next apocalyptic threat.
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She might have said the chance to do something reckless like this was half the reason she was in her line of work. But there was no one to bluff except her crew on the other end of the comm—Dug, Tisker, and Sophie—and she owed them more than words. She owed them a job that didn’t end up costing more than it paid. She owed them a ship that wasn’t in constant want of repairs. She owed them a ship worthy of being called a home.
A soft click sounded in the comm of her helmet, and Dug’s voice cut through the quiet sounds of her rapid heartbeat and quick breaths. The voice tube transmission made him sound small and far away. “Progressing well, captain. How much farther do you need?”
Talis unclenched her jaw to answer. “I’d guess I’m just about halfway down. Can’t make out any details yet.”
“Understood. There is plenty of length on the winch.” Her first mate’s voice was low and even, though his syllables were tight as a guitar string. Dug was worried.
The bulky descent suit didn’t make it any easier to see the view below her. It was a one-size-fits-all antique, big enough to wear over her clothes. Big enough that Dug, who towered above her and was thick with muscle—could have worn it, if he was so worried. It was designed to keep her body heat in, and it was most definitely doing that. The musty wool lining felt moist after the short time she’d had it on. Her breath fogged the glass dome that protected her from the thin air, even though she wore a scarf over her mouth. Yet her fingers were still getting stiff with the cold. She could have worn thicker gloves if she was just going down to strap up a large object to tow out. But this time her quarry was smaller than that, and thinner gloves provided better dexterity.
From this distance, the garbage below her looked deceptively beautiful. A lazy flow of icy shapes caught the green light from Nexus, and their reflected light sparkled through the fogging on her helmet. It wasn’t hard to imagine why there were so many stories about treasure down below.
And there was treasure down there. Or, reckless or not, she wouldn’t be dropping into it. The flotsam layer was where the dead went to be forgotten. Dead people. Dead ships. Dead technologies. Gravity trapped it all there. Kept it from dropping out of Peridot’s atmosphere on the bottom side and drifting off into the stars. Silus Cutter created the hoarbeasts centuries ago to prowl the frozen wreckage and clean things up a bit with their vicious, crunching jaws and fang-lined throats. Did her god intend for those beasts to prefer the frozen flesh of bodies to the wrecks? She wouldn’t ask if she got the chance; she was here for the latter and glad to have the chance.
If things went wrong, Talis would be on the menu, too. But the contract for this salvage made it worth the risk. She could make a lot of overdue repairs on Wind Sabre with the payoff. Her crew had been enthusiastic about the operation when she proposed it, knowing what kind of money a salvage might bring in. Better than the transport jobs she’d scrounged up of late. Not one of the trio had volunteered to make the descent, though.
“You’re the reckless one, Cap,” Tisker told her at the time. The cheeky helmsman got away with the comment. He always did. His crooked, infectious grin and sparkling, deceptively innocent eyes transformed every gibe into a morale boost.
Details emerged, just a couple lengths below Talis. Large shapes at first. Broken hulls of ships tangled in their own lift canvasses. A roof, a wagon. An old tree trunk. Anything organic or burnable should have been composted or used for fuel, not pitched over island edge. But those hadn’t always been the rules. Seventy-something generations back to the Cataclysm that fractured Peridot and the Re-Creation that made it what it was now. Seventy-something generations of garbage and waste swirled in the gravity trap. And down here, nothing ever decayed.
Soon she got close enough to see movement: the hoarbeasts pulling themselves across the wrecks, their undersides a chaos of tentacles. Their bodies flashing gray and silver in an imitation of the flotsam. They moved above and below the gravity line, scanning the field of garbage with cavernous eyes and probing the jetsam with sensitive, bobbing whiskers. Always in search of fresh additions to the flotsam layer. In search of food. In search of the dead.
And they would find them.
Mostly Cutter folk. Some Vein. Even a Rakkar or two. The Bone fed their dead to the ravens and kept the bones, but still ended up in flotsam. Usually lost with their ships. No Breakers, of course. Their population was finite and, as far as the ages since Re-Creation had proven out, didn’t die of natural causes.
If they couldn’t find dead flesh, they’d be perfectly happy to accept the living.
Continuing to descend, Talis was far too aware of such things. Her brother had tormented her with stories of the hoarbeasts when she was a child, and she grew up convinced they clung to the bottom of her bed the way they latched onto the hulls of airships that flew too low, too close to flotsam. Convinced that their tentacles and their long, sharp teeth would find her in the dark.
In her forties now, and captain of a smuggling ship that had taken on many a perilous contract, she still didn’t sleep with her feet hanging off her mattress.
Her love of SFF storytelling developed through grabbing for anything-and-everything “unicorn” as a child, but she was subverted by tales of distant solar systems when her brother introduced her to Star Trek: The Next Generation at age seven. A few years later, Sailor Moon taught her stories can have both.
She lives in New England, haunted by her childhood cat. Find more information at rjtheodore.com.
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