I found this flash fiction nugget (your choice if it’s more like a chicken nugget or a gold nugget) while looking through my older Distant Horizon Universe newsletters. I originally sent this out on February 20th of 2020.
Since I’ve been having fun with flash fiction and poetry lately, I thought it might be fun to revisit now.
This little shorty doesn’t follow a particular character, but does take inspiration from both Distant Horizon and Deceived. 🙂
Students mill around her. Chatting. Heading to class. Nothing new.
But this place is a lie.
It’s that poster by the door that reminds her. Stark white with pale blue lettering.
Safety Security Efficiency
Her throat squeezes and she can barely breathe.
Lie-lie-lie…
A firm hand clamps on her shoulder. Soldier-agent-danger–
She recoils and her shoulder slams the wall, knocking aside the poster. She needs to hide–
“Woah, it’s just me.” A young man smiles at her, confusion in his eyes. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
She knows him. Knew him.
He doesn’t know her. Not anymore.
Still, she forces a smile and rights the poster on the wall. She can’t afford to lose the efficiency points. “Sorry. I guess I was thinking too hard about which building has my next class.”
Her heart pounds like a student slamming the walls of a transformation chamber.
“You weren’t gone that long.” He chuckles. “Which Community did you visit, anyway? We thought you’d failed the scan.”
It’s hard to maintain her smile. “I visited the European Community.”
A lie like those words on that poster.
“Neat. Maybe I’ll get to go sometime. See you around.” He waves as he reenters the stream of students filtering through the hall. “The Community is safe!”
She can’t muster the enthusiasm to say the usual response.
She never went to Europe.
She never knew where they sent her when she failed the scan.
But she found her way back.
They’re going to wish she hadn’t.
One of the things I enjoy about flash fiction is the questions they spawn, and the possible stories. 🙂
Who is she? Will she succeed in getting vengeance? What in particular does she want vengeance for?
Seeing as how she failed the scan, what are her powers?
Why, and how, did she make it back to the Community?
I didn’t have those answers when I first wrote it and I still don’t have them now… but it’s still a fun exercise.
* * *
Jenna and Galina both see the Community in new light after an unfortunate visit to a transformation facility…
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Today I thought I’d dive into the romance sub-plot in the Distant Horizon series. Now… before we go any further…
If you like to read books with no idea of which characters show any interest in each other, then go read Distant Horizon, Fractured Skies, and Starless Night first! There will be spoilers ahead. I’ll try not to go into anything too major, but it’s kind of hard to avoid in this particular overview.
Have you read them? (Or don’t mind spoilers?)
All right. We shall now proceed. 🙂
Anyway, in Distant Horizon there wasn’t much of a romance sub-plot. I tend to prefer slow-burn stories, if there’s romance at all, and for the most part, Jenna’s mind really wasn’t on finding a partner. She’s a too busy fighting terrifying subhuman beasts and trying not to get killed.
Once we get to Fractured Skies, however, that starts to change. While Jenna is still dead-set on stopping beast transformation, certain other team members *Cough*Lance*Cough* are starting to settle into their new roles and are interested in pursuing a relationship.
Which… ah… if you remember the first book, Jenna and Lance butted heads. A lot.
They’re best friends, but they don’t always see eye-to-eye.
But there’s that expectation of childhood friends sometimes going on to become efficient partners in the Community, so Jenna (somewhat begrudgingly) decides to give dating a try between researching how to stop beast transformation and how to get rid of the memory seeds.
Let’s just say there are complications… especially when she starts to realize that she and Lily… a mercenary who seems to understand where she’s coming from surprisingly well… get along better.
(I apparently rather enjoy the enemies to allies/enemies to lovers trope).
Now, when Isaac and I first ran the campaign that Distant Horizon spawned from, the original pairing was Jenna and Lance… with all the complications that came with them clashing. What I hadn’t anticipated was that, when writing the story, Jenna and Lily would end up with far more chemistry. (The sort of warm, fluttery feeling of “will they get together?” despite not planning on writing it that way. Which seems to keep happening to me. Characters completely surprise me by being tender to each other or pebbling each other with cute gifts and the next thing I know I’m shipping them together… and then I realize I’m the author so… does that still count as shipping?).
After having Isaac read the draft and having him be completely in favor of giving them a chance…
(By completely in favor I mean he kept nudging me with more ideas of cute scenes.)
I rewrote those scenes with the idea of building the romantic tension between Jenna and Lily, which added to Jenna’s debate of whether to go the more expected route of the efficiency of a Community partner, which she and Lance don’t seem to have… or her gut feeling that she and Lily share something special and work together better, despite their different backgrounds.
Isaac and I further explored the different relationships in Starless Night.
And let’s just say the bond between Lily and Jenna becomes extremely important. (Especially as a certain brain seed she’s fighting is determined to cut away any romantic bonds in its fight to stay relevant). Starless Night is not a romance book by any stretch of the imagination, but their relationship becomes crucial to the book’s resolution and Jenna’s fight with the brain seed.
Though Jenna and Lily haven’t yet had a happily-ever-after (HEA) or even a happy-for-now (HFN), I have my suspicions about how I want their relationship to go by the time I get to the end of the series (whether that’s one or two more books… not sure yet).
* * *
Read a very slow-burn romance seeded under a lot of world-building and adventure…
Meet Tim Zaytsev, the Legion Spore’s external organic operating system!
(Tim would cringe so hard at that. The Legion Spore, and its successor the Manticore, are airships made from the bodies of shapeshifters forced to merge with technology. In theory, the resulting ships are supposed to be a blank slate. Instead, memories of the people who were tied into the ship cause destructive glitches, which Tim has been hired to find and purge).
Once, many years ago (because I’ve been combing through my old newsletters to find stuff I think is interesting enough to yoink and place here in this blog) I took a shot at using Daz Studio to create a figure who would represent Tim from The Glitch Saga. This was still pretty early in my attempts to use Daz Studio, and my asset library was a bit smaller to work with, so it took a few tries before I successfully made a design I was truly happy with.
I wanted to tie the render in with a quote from the book, so I picked a snippet from Spirits of a Glitch, the third book of the series.
Tim is dealing with the Manticore (who has a much harsher personality than the airship you see in Whispers in the Code):
So easily distracted. Surely you see the flaw?
I groan in exasperation. “Where is this other glitch?” Right now there’s nothing but an arrogant machine who keeps messing with my attempts to correctly program it.
The vessel sighs. The glitch belongs to our external organic operating system.
“You don’t have a—”
You, Master Zaytsev. You are our external organic operating system.
I wasn’t quite happy with this render… I wanted to switch the hair to something closer to how I pictured Tim’s hair, and I wanted to make him look a bit younger (I’m aiming for 18-19 years old).
(Also, I’m absolutely terrible at judging age in real life, let alone in renders).
Later, I took another shot at Tim’s design. For this version, I changed the hair I was using (I was thrilled that the hair I wanted to use for him went on sale almost immediately when I started eyeing it), and I did some work to his facial structure to make him look a bit younger.
There were still a few tweaks I wanted to do before calling it final (the back of his jaw/cheek was still too sunken in and the hair wasn’t quite sitting properly around his forehead), but overall, I was pretty happy with this variation.
I’m pretty sure I made a few more adjustments later, but I don’t think I have a fully rendered image with those adjustments. So, for today, we’ll focus on the early renders of the Legion Spore’s external organic operating system. 😉
* * *
Read the tragic downfall of Tim Zaytsev as he navigates the perils of the Legion Spore…
Many years ago, while Isaac and I were enjoying Applebee’s 25 cent wing special (do they do that anymore?) and getting some studying done, we had the joy of running into someone who had read one of our books and seen us at the local comic con.
(*Squee! Recognition!*) ☺️
Anyway, that was awesome.
But during our conversation, one of the things the reader mentioned was wondering a bit more about the gamemaster guy and the sea monster he threw at the protagonists toward the end of Distant Horizon, and whether or not there’d be more about him in the next book.
(Spoiler… there is. His name is Spectator, and he plays the role of a minor antagonist in Fractured Skies, and gets a couple mentions in Starless Night. He also makes a brief appearance in Initiated.)
The conversation got me thinking more about that character and his role in the Distant Horizon universe. Isaac and I have gone back and forth into how much of a role he should play (with me usually wanting to give Spectator a bigger role and Isaac wanting to scale him back… mostly because Spectator has a tendency to interfere with overarching plot points or become deus ex machina. His scenes have gone through a lot of revisions).
Granted, part of the deus ex machina problem might be because that was his original role in the game.
See… I had a tendency to make some not-great decisions for Jenna in the role-play game Isaac and I were playing, and I’d kinda-maybe-sorta gotten her captured by the bad guys with no explainable hope of escape in what was supposed to be a one-shot campaign.
That I very much wanted to see continue because I had questions and I wanted answers.
So Isaac snagged a character from one of my previous campaigns in the same world (but modern day), upgraded that character to Spectator status, and decided this newfound “Spectator” was going to make sure the game continued (see “fourthwalling,” below).
So Spectator does a bit of timey-wimey/alternate reality manipulation to make sure certain events can now happen, and the last scene of the one shot campaign got a teensy update.
And Jenna’s team is now able to come to her rescue.
(And we did a ton of work in the novels to make sure his involvement makes sense and doesn’t read quite so deus ex machina-y.)
And once we’d done a bit more work, we determined that Spectator is kind of like the “Q” of the Distant Horizon Universe (Q from Star Trek, for those not familiar). Spectator is not quite omnipotent but close, well aware of things he shouldn’t be, and mischievous. He can put just about any character who knows who he is on edge. He’s a reality bender, capable of changing the world around him to suit his whims, at least to an extent, and he’s also a fourthwaller, meaning he believes he’s part of game world of sorts, and thanks to his insight, he can break through the walls of that world.
Within the Distant Horizon universe there is a cult of fourthwallers who believe their world is controlled by two gamemasters, and that, in order to maintain their existence, they must be as interesting as possible to hold the attention of those gamemasters. Unfortunately, this means that if they lock in on somebody they think is a “player character,” they’ll cause them worlds of trouble in an attempt to stay in the gamemaster’s focus.
That’s all fairly meta, though, and most of the characters simply try to avoid fourthwallers when possible, dismissing them as crazy. Jenna, having come from the Community, has no idea these people exist until Spectator shows up. The rest of the rebels, once they realize he’s a fourthwaller and getting involved, are quick to research everything they can about him… all while trying to keep mysterious artifacts (the ones that lead to the sea monster showing up during Distant Horizon— it actually wasn’t Spectator’s fault) out of the hands of their rivals.
Spectator’s role in the story is explained more in Fractured Skies, so I’m going to avoid delving too much into that since that would be spoilers. But I hope you find him as interesting as I do.😁
Eventually, more will be revealed about the role of reality benders and fourthwallers, a trope I have readily enjoyed both in shows like Star Trek, involving Q, and in superhero stories, like X-Men.
Long story short, Isaac and I are both fans of Star Trek (For me, Voyager was long my favorite, though my first experience came from Next Generation, but Lower Decks now might be my favorite among the series, followed pretty close by Strange New Worlds).
Next Generation, however, introduced me to one of my favorite Star Trek characters: Q.
He’s such a fun character, especially paired against straight-laced Jean Luc Picard. It also helps that the actor who plays Q, John de Lancie, is pretty cool, too. (At least from what I’ve seen of him).
Fun fact, if you ever watch the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic series (which has some surprisingly great nods to science fiction, fantasy, and various social themes you might not expect), Discord (a chaotic character of that series) is played by John de Lancie. The show’s writers wanted to get someone who could pull off a Q-like character. The people in charge of casting decided, why not ask the original actor, just in case? According to one of his interviews, he was a bit surprised, but went ahead and agreed to the role… meaning that a few iconic references to Q from Star Trek landed in MLP.
Also, the actor was one of my favorite panelists at a Star Trek convention I went to when I was in high school, and he was really friendly at answering my teen self’s questions about acting and directing. Plus, he can direct a pretty good radio play (I had the fortune of seeing that in college).
All righty… I digress.
Point is, I think Q is a cool character, so of course that made its way into characters I enjoy writing.
* * *
See how the meddlesome Spectator gets involved in the Distant Horizon universe…
Many, many Distant Horizon Universe newsletters ago, back in early 2019, I had a poll for which Distant Horizon beast subscribers would like to see me try to render in Daz.
Keyword being “try” to render, because I was still learning the program and uh… even my drawn attempts to create beasties hadn’t been that great.
At the time, I had a lot fewer assets to work with, and a lot less practice with morphing the figure’s features to get the desired look.
Anyway, with a lot of Photoshop post-processing…
This was my take on a plant beast “candid shot” caught in the wild by a rebel photographer.
The image was inspired by this section from Distant Horizon, where Jenna sees a picture of a plant beast for the first time:
The image had been taken in a jungle, with thick ferns and tall trees spiraling around the frame. It focused on a vaguely humanoid creature. Thick, woody vines wrapped around its hands, twined across its shoulders, and curled around its collarbone. The vines rested loose against its bare chest. The creature—male—was naked, with pale, green-tinted skin and a thicker brow. Like the beast we’d seen in the security feed, this one had cat-like eyes and pointed ears.
Anyway, there you have it!
First attempt to create a Distant Horizon beast in Daz.
Should I give it another go sometime, try a then and now?
* * *
Discover what the Camaraderie doesn’t want the Community to know exists in the Distant Horizon…
If you enjoy the world-building of the Distant Horizon or Huntress series, you might enjoy these books!
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Back when I was originally writing the rough draft for Little One and the Glitch saga (many many years ago, because I was still in the process of figuring out what I was doing with my writing and hadn’t started publishing), I decided to read a few horror books to get a feel for how those stories worked and how to get an underlying tone of dread and something bad about to happen.
One of the books I read was Christine by Stephen King.
Though I don’t remember a whole lot about the plot now, one of the things that stood out to me when I was reading it was how Arnie’s personality slowly changed over the course of the story, and at one point, the narrator realizes that Arnie’s signature has changed due to how he scribbles it on a cast.
That image stuck in my head, and while I had originally read Christine in hopes of getting inspiration for Little One and Glitch, Christine ended up being far more influential on the Distant Horizon series.
Especiallyfor book three, Starless Night.
The book ended up influencing the concept of brain seeds… a telepathic attack that rewards and punishes its target’s behavior so they’ll do what the seed wants. The more the seed grows, the more the target changes.
It’s an issue Jenna, the main character of the series, is all too familiar with.
When Isaac and I first came up with the Distant Horizon world, memory seeds and brain seeds weren’t a thing. Lady Winters did have a tendency to mentally blast people with telepathy and horrifying images, but these weren’t the constant attacks that Jenna has to deal with… or the slow change of personality that we start to see in Fractured Skies and that tries to assert control in Starless Night.
These were small changes in mannerisms, occasional phrases of speech… and Jenna’s general preference in regards to coffee (which were really fun to write).
Below is a scene from Starless Night that takes place between Jenna and Stuart, a butler for the Camaraderie. Stuart has been around for quite some time, and he is perceptive. (And also a powerful telepath who was not fond of Lady Winters).
He can recognize a threat to both Coalition and Camaraderie:
Stuart inclined his head toward the cup in my hands. “It is my understanding you only recently took an interest in coffee. Is that correct?”
I frowned. “Tastes change. Why?”
“Though I shall continue to suggest tea as the superior drink of choice, may I ask how you like your coffee?”
“What do you mean?”
“Cream? Sugar? Or black—”
“Black as a starless night,” I interrupted, taking a sip of the drink. It was more burnt than black, but bitter was bitter.
The butler’s eyebrows narrowed almost imperceptibly. Danger…
The feeling faded. He was only a butler.
“For the sakes of those you care about,” he said, “you should do your best to fight the seed. No one cared for Winters except herself. But there are many who care about you.”
(That said, I somehow managed to nix the phrase “coffee, black as a starless night” from the drafts of both the Glitch series and in Distant Horizon, which effectively destroyed some of the foreshadowing I had intended. *Facepalm.* If I ever do a revamp of the series, that’s getting added back in somewhere. Isaac even gave me a coffee mug for Christmas one year with the Camaraderie symbol and the quote, though it’s long since faded).
How Jenna refers to people, whether she’s nice to them or condescending, whether she knows a little more than she should about a particular situation… all these were little details I got to tinker with.
The biggest issue for me was keeping track of what changes have already started in one book and which ones had yet to take root.
Once we get to book four (currently drafted/semi-revised), she sort of has control again, but she’ll have some all-new problems to deal with.
Either way, the idea of a shifting personality and how the others around the person being affected person respond to those changes, definitely got at least some inspiration from reading Christine.
* * *
An evil brain seed is determined to take root in Jenna’s brain…
When Isaac and I first created the Distant Horizon universe, we made it as a homebrew role-play game, sort of a cross between the 90s cartoon X-Men, and The Giver. (Dystopian world with superheroes). There were a lot more superhero references in the game…
And in the names.
Especially for the villains.
For example, Lord Black (the founder of the Community), was usually called “Jellyman” or “Lord Gelatinous” due to his natural form looking something like jelly.
*Cough.*
We eventually decided he probably wouldn’t call himself that, and he definitely wouldn’t have encouraged the people in the Community to call him that (especially since they’re very particular about maintaining appearances and hiding the existence of super powers). But the rebels, particularly those who had a grudge against him, might.
I found a stray reference in an early draft of Starless Night where a character grumbles “Son of Gelatinous!” in frustration. Lord Black’s son was something of a rebel, and therefore a source of frustration to his father. Needless to say, that line got reworked, since it no longer made sense.
Another example was Lady Winters, who was first referenced as Brainmaster. She had a couple name changes, actually. First was Brainmaster, then we changed that to Lady Bridget. But that was too easily confused with Lady Black when reading, so we changed it yet again to Lady Winters.
Long story short, we decided there was no way she would call herself Brainmaster, and most of her underlings would know better than to call her that, too. And they try not to think it either, in case she’s reading their mind. That said, due to her cruelty, the Brainmaster moniker has stuck around for both the Camaraderie and rebel faction if she’s not within earshot or mind-reading range.
And then there’s “The Camaraderie of Evil.”
That name actually got to stay. In Whispers in the Code, Commander Rick explains why they kept the name.
“You will be challenged by much of what we do,” he continues. “In the Community, your tasks were simple: program basic systems, keep everything running smoothly… This job is not so simple. We call ourselves the Camaraderie of Evil because we are willing to take steps others wouldn’t dare consider. That’s the only way we can accomplish security and efficiency. I don’t personally believe we are evil, but the name stuck around from our earlier days, and they were… an interesting bunch.”
What the commander doesn’t mention is that they got the name because the founders were a group of young, ambitious (and variably “evil”) people with powers getting frustrated with their uptight “mad scientist” of the group and deciding they would call themselves that to taunt him.
They didn’t expect it to stick and, nowadays, the COE typically just calls themselves the Camaraderie… or if they’re in the Community, “The Community of E-Leadership.”
Other names were changed for ease of reading. Janice became Gwen because we had so many “J” names already and that was the easiest one to swap and keep the others.
Overall, I think the changes were for the better, though they did change the flavor a bit from role-play game to reading.
* * *
Most of the names got updated. Even so, characters leaving the Community for the outside world still have a few superhero/supervillain surprises in store…
It seems like dishes… and just about anything else… gets done when it’s time for the proofreading stage.
Oh, there’s a chore that needs done? Dishes been piling up? The counters are clean now!
Laundry need washed? Everything’s now been washed and hung in the closet! (Or neatly stacked in a chair because the closet is cold and I’d rather put on warm clothes in the morning thank-you-very-much).
Plants need a little bit of pruning? Even those pesky scale bugs are about to face the gardener’s otherwise defeated wrath.
Or, for a little more fun… new stories need written? Old stories need revised? Let’s do this!
(Inner voice just scowls. “No new stories for you right now. Jot down a few notes and get back to proofreading! Finish what you’ve started!”)
*Sigh.*
There’s all these other new stories calling you to write them, but you’re stuck giving that manuscript you’ve looked over nearly a dozen times one more read to look for typos, and then after you’ve given it that maybe-final/maybe-not-final read you’ve got to actually input those notes into the manuscript.
*Cue second sigh.*
Proofreading might be my least favorite part of the process.
Still, proofreading is important, and helps me to correct little typos I don’t want you guys to suffer through. Missing “a”s and “the”s. The occasional word that just doesn’t make sense. Minor plot points I thought I removed during the read-aloud but accidentally remained in place. That sort of thing.
It’s all about polishing… even if, for me, it is the least interesting part of the process.
Funny thing is that in the 2018 newsletter email I’m adapting this post from, I was lamenting the proofreading process for Fractured Skies.
Now I’m lamenting the proofreading/editing process for The Dark Forest of Aneth. The reading part’s been done. I just need to add my editing notes to the manuscript. But… uh… there’s been an outline and draft written for Huntress 3 and a whole new 5,000-word short story drafted, polished, and sent to beta-readers since I finished that reading a few months ago. *Cough.*
So… yeah.
Do I need to write that draft I’ve been meaning to write for five years?
Looks like I just need to get myself some proofreading or editing notes!
In the meantime… here’s a throwback to when my Legion Spore plushie got to help out with the proofreading:
Isn’t it adorable? (Well, as adorable as living airships made from shapeshifters go). Isaac made it for me for Christmas a few years back.
Actually, I also made him a Legion Spore plushie (we both had the same idea), but let’s just say that the one he made better matched the first Legion Spore, and the one I made closer resembled the Manticore. We had a productive discussion after that regarding the differences between how we saw the living airship of The Glitch Saga.
Needless to say, the Legion Spores you see in the books have been refined a bit.
Or a lot.
And that’s another reason that proofreading… and read-alouds… and beta-reading… is important!
* * *
Read a few polished books that I at some point had to proofread or edit…
Stephanie Flint - Author and Artist 