NaNoW­riMo is bear­ing down on us, and I have an inter­est­ing idea for this year’s novel. I’m skip­ping over the epic space opera I’ve been tin­ker­ing with for two decades and telling sto­ries on the other side of it. Here’s what you need to know if you’re going to fol­low my cre­ative process through NaNoW­riMo. The galaxy has just been through a dev­as­tat­ing war against an ancient ter­ror that returned after being dri­ven away a thou­sand years ago. The war is over, the Neme­sis has been destroyed once and for all, but in the process Sol went nova and the remains of human­ity are scat­tered among the stars, with­out a home­world or even a gov­ern­ment. Even though humans were the glue that held the alliance together, the sur­vivors are shunned because it turned out human­ity was an off­shoot of the Neme­sis, the only other humanoid race any­one has ever seen. We were a sci­ence project of the Guardians, an even more ancient race of pro­tec­tors, left on Earth to develop under the watch­ful eye of nan­otech­no­log­i­cally immor­tal shep­herds, the angels and demons of Between Heaven and Hell. Got all that? It’s all back story now.

Sins of the Moth­ers fea­tures the Sendeni, the most pow­er­ful of the for­mer alliance races and the species we first encoun­tered when we ven­tured out into the stars. They’re dinosauroid/​avians, and look like a cross between a big brained veloci­rap­tor and a turkey. Their soci­ety is rigidly matri­ar­chal, as the males of the species are con­sid­ered too vio­lent and too dumb to hold any posi­tions of author­ity. After the Neme­sis War, the males, who have seen dur­ing the war how other species treat their males, rise up in rev­o­lu­tion for equal treat­ment, lead­ing to a civil war that nearly tears the Sendeni apart.

That’s the set­ting. But I still don’t really have a story.

Story is about char­ac­ter, first and fore­most. So who is this novel really about? A civil war is a big thing. I could tell the story in a sweep­ing, cast-​of-​thousands Tol­stoy style, but there are two prob­lems with this. One, that’s not really a nar­ra­tive style I’m com­fort­able with, or that appeals to me as a reader. Two, all the char­ac­ters would be aliens, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for the reader to con­nect with any of them or even pick up the ten­ants of Sendeni cul­ture and society.

So I decided to make this a smaller story. The story will be about a human stranded on Senden after the Neme­sis War ends, a human who then has to try to sur­vive as civil war erupts around her (the choice to make my focal char­ac­ter female was a gut choice that I really don’t have a rea­son for; I just like women, espe­cially strong women). But who is she? Why is she there in the first place?

I felt she needed to be a diplo­mat or ambas­sador of some sort, some rea­son to be the only human on the planet. But what kind of ambas­sador would you choose to send to an alien world? Anthro­pol­ogy and lin­guis­tics might be more valu­able skills than basic diplo­macy. Then it hit me. Those of you old enough to remem­ber the cold war, remem­ber how both CIA and KGB agents always had offi­cial titles like “Cul­tural Attaché”? That’s what she is. Her offi­cial rea­son for being on Senden is to pro­vide the Sendeni High Coun­cil with insight into their new allies in the Neme­sis War. Her unof­fi­cial pur­pose for being there is to spy on the Sendeni and relay every­thing she can about them back to Earth.

Of course, as the book opens the war ends, as does her entire rea­son for being there. Both of them. The Sendeni don’t need her any­more and there’s no gov­ern­ment back on Earth to report to because there’s no Earth any­more. What does that mean for our pro­tag­o­nist? What will become of her now. Tak­ing inspi­ra­tion from James Patrick Kelley’s “Think Like A Dinosaur,” I think the Sendeni will come to the idea that they should just kill her. It’s a lot cheaper than send­ing her back, and besides, humans are really the same thing as the Neme­sis, right? May as well go for the clean slate. So shortly after estab­lish­ing the set­ting, we end up with our pro­tag­o­nist on the run on a planet where there are no humans and every­one she meets will want to kill her.

Now that sounds like a good story.

It goes beyond that, of course. Our pro­tag­o­nist is dif­fer­ent than most humans, too. She was the com­mu­ni­ca­tions offi­cer on a Ter­ran destroyer that actu­ally fought the Neme­sis. The Neme­sis looks human but is a sin­gle tele­pathic hive mind, mil­lions of “peo­ple” act­ing as a sin­gle organ­ism. When it comes in con­tact with humans, the tele­pathic waves it sends out actu­ally awaken telepa­thy in 0.1% of humans. Of the roughly one mil­lion humans left in the galaxy, that means that about a thou­sand of them have become telepaths (as nearly all of the humans left are war vet­er­ans who came in con­tact with the Neme­sis at one point or another). And our pro­tag­o­nist is one of them. It’s part of the rea­son she got the job after being taken out of the mil­i­tary. Her abil­i­ties are still devel­op­ing, and right now are lim­ited to invol­un­tary flashes she gets of other minds. She can’t con­trol it very well if at all, and has been doing well just not to let the Sendeni know she’s a telepath. But one of these tele­pathic flashes is enough to tip her off to their plan to kill her, and it’s enough to help her com­mu­ni­cate with the males (who obvi­ously haven’t been taught Eng­lish) she meets up with later.

So now we’ve got almost every­thing we need. A com­pelling char­ac­ter, an inter­est­ing set­ting and some con­flict to start us off. But we still need a name.

I’ve got a few resources I use for char­ac­ter names, because the names I come up with off the top of my head are almost invari­ably lame white-​guy names. The Ter­ran Repub­lic dur­ing the Neme­sis War has been a sin­gle world gov­ern­ment for nearly two cen­turies, and I want a char­ac­ter that reflects post-​European diver­sity. I decided to make her Hindi, since sta­tisi­cally speak­ing there’s a bet­ter than one in three chance even today that any ran­domly selected human will be either Indian or Chi­nese. Con­sult­ing 20000-names.com, which gives me a nice selec­tion of names from around the world, I pull out two inter­est­ing names.

LEELAVATHI: Hindi name mean­ing “free will of God.”

MUKTA: Hindi name mean­ing “liberated.”

SophieBoth of these tie into the theme I’m going for with the book, as this human helps to lib­er­ate the oppressed male Sendeni, who have been second-​class menial labor­ers for cen­turies. Now but nei­ther has the fla­vor I’m look­ing for for her first name, the name we’ll be call­ing her most of the time. For that I pull out an app on my iPhone called Baby Names that has names, ori­gins and mean­ings and scan through the female names until some­thing catches my eye. And there it is. Sophro­nia, from the Greek for fore­sighted. Nice name for a telepath.

So now I have my main char­ac­ter. Sophro­nia Mukta Leelavathi, but she goes by Sophie. Thanks to another iPhone app called Avatar Cre­ator, I also have a pic­ture of Sophie, to help solid­ify her in my mind’s eye. We know who she is, what she’s doing on Senden, how she got there and what has to hap­pen next. Next up, world building.

UPDATE: Okay, I lied. I do know why Sophie is a chick, I just didn’t know I knew it when I wrote this article.

Even though this story is about aliens and humans in a far flung soci­ety, it’s a story for early 21st cen­tury read­ers. Most soci­eties on Earth today are either strongly patri­ar­chal or have patri­ar­chal his­to­ries, and I’m turn­ing that famil­iar­ity on its head by mak­ing the females the oppres­sor class in Sendeni soci­ety. The males will be the scrappy under­dogs who aren’t get­ting a fair shake. But given that the back­ground of the novel is a gen­der war, I want to make sure that I, as a male writer, don’t allow the book to come across as misog­y­nis­tic. So I’ll make the focal char­ac­ter, the pro­tag­o­nist, heck, the gor­ram nar­ra­tor – since I con­tinue to have an unhealthy fas­ci­na­tion with first per­son nar­ra­tive, even though I know it’s harder to write well – a female.

Maybe this bal­anc­ing act comes across as cal­cu­lat­ing or arti­fi­cial, but in many ways that’s what fic­tion is. This is a made up story. There aren’t any real Sendeni or, to the best of my knowl­edge, telepaths. Fic­tion is about cre­at­ing sto­ries that are more sat­is­fy­ing than real life. In a lot of ways, the arti­fi­cial­ity of fic­tion is why we read it in the first place.