Please welcome, friend and author, Steve Eston...

...to the blog this week.  Hi Steve, thanks for being here and tell me, what is the story behind your story in our recently published anthology...

Thank you Angela for inviting me to your blog.  I’m honoured to be here.  It’s a feeling not dissimilar to how I felt a little over a year ago when Allan Hudson asked me if I would be interested in contributing to an anthology that eventually became Autumn Paths.

I remember being both delighted and daunted by the invitation.  When I saw the list of authors, I almost ran the other way.  I’m exaggerating, but only a little.  Everyone on the roster had much more experience than I did.  On top of which, I was the only one writing fantasy and science fiction.  I felt somewhat the impostor (an affliction that seems to run rampant with authors).  In the end, though, it was just too enticing an opportunity to pass and the project quickly became a highlight in my writing venture.

When it came time to decide which story to submit, I was hoping that one of the many projects I had under development would fit the selected theme.  I went through the list, but you’ve guessed it: nothing felt quite right (vive Murphy’s Law!).

At this point, I remembered some readers telling me that they wanted to learn more about the System of Garadia, the futuristic world where my latest science fiction novel, Deficiency, took place.  All right, let’s be honest.  What the readers asked for was a sequel...  I honestly didn’t see that coming, and as a result, none was planned (things have changed slightly since then).  Still, the anthology provided an opportunity.

I thoroughly enjoyed writing Deficiency and quickly started looking forward to coming back to the System of Garadia. One of the reasons I enjoyed this project so much was the characters. Of the wide cast, my favorite was an intrepid woman named Eltaya. She only plays a secondary role in Deficiency, but I knew she would be coming back. In the novel, we learn that her family is missing and we see her use some nifty technologies.

And there it was, the premise for Red Stars: ”On a far away world, a woman is looking for her lost family”.

Like most of my stories, I started with a short first draft and added details and layers with the next five or six iterations, almost tripling the length of the text.  I know that many authors write a long first draft and then pair it down.  Stephen King, in his book “About Writing”, proposes the following formula: 2nd draft = 1st draft - 10%.  That doesn’t quite work for me.  For Red Stars, I went through the story nine times, and although I reduced its length significantly by the end, I still continued to polish and add details until that last version.

Red Stars touches on the sense of self, while playing with memories, real versus fabricated.  It also explores a particular technology that is both terrifying and limitless in its possibilities.  As the author, I can frankly say that I do not understand everything about it yet.  I probably never will.

This was a challenging story to write, but also very rewarding.  I’m grateful for the anthology, because it probably would not have been written otherwise.  I hope readers will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

 

You can follow Steve on his Website Facebook Twitter and on Instagram   

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You can get his books on Amazon

A copy of Autumn Paths is available Here and you can read more about the anthology, the other authors, and their stories Here  Here  Here and  Here