A few years ago, I wrote 3 books, a little over 300,000 words, in one month. My editor still hasn’t forgiven me.

At that time, I had just been laid off of one of those soul-sucking jobs that left no room for creativity, so I had a lot of time, and a lot of creativity energy wanting to find an outlet. Those books formed the very, very rough beginnings of the Dawn of Steam trilogy. In the aftermath, I discovered that, when I have the time and energy, I put a lot of words on the page, editing, finding proof-reading, re-writes and more editing take a whole lot longer than the actual writing.

Since that time, most of my writing projects have followed a bit more traditional style and structure, but I’m still very glad to have started something that looks and feels different from almost anything else out there. Dawn of Steam: First Light is an epistolary novel, written entirely in the form of letters and journal entries from the characters. Appropriate to a story set in 1815, those notes are also written in Regency style, though the spelling has been ‘translated.’

The book is as much alternate-history as it is specifically Steampunk. While it definitely has Jules-Verne-styled science-fiction elements to it, especially the steampunk-favorite airship, a lot of time was put into trying to ground the book in the culture, politics, and natural events of the time. I tweaked those things which should be affected by the handful of specific changes that led to the differences between real-world technology and that of the book, but anything else was meant to be very recognizable from the real world. Events like the Tambora eruption, which led to the year without a summer of 1815-1816, and the Storm of 1815, which turned Long Island into an island, still happen. The slave trade and controversy over it, along with the Napoleonic Wars, are very much parts of the story, even if their narrative may shift.

The later books have a similar theme. While First Light stays within the fairly familiar Steampunk settings of England and America, later books will hit New Zealand, Australia, Africa, Japan, and elsewhere. The characters interact with elements of real-world history, exposing corners of the world to the fantastic amidst events familiar to students of the regency era. These encounters change the world, sometimes subtly, sometimes less so. The ultimate goal is not just to tell a story, but to lay the foundations of at least one vision of where many of the tropes common to the Steampunk genre could have originated. Airships as a common mode of travel, reasonably egalitarian progress allowing for more female doctors and mechanics than were ever seen in the real world, and the belief in the triumph of technology over superstition, or at least allowing for them to become more blended.

By the time I sat down to write for my first National Novel Writing Month, most of the ideas were already there. Real-world history had formed a lot of the research base, and there were plenty of other Steampunk books out there, giving me a target to shoot for. I hadn’t realized when I started just how many words it would take to tell a story that bridged standard history and proper ‘modern’ Steampunk. Even while editing the second book in the series now, preparing to publish Dawn of Steam: Gods of the Sun in September of this year, I’ve gotten the first chapter written for an eventual Book 4, set in 1825, five years after the third book ends, and it looks like that may turn into another trilogy.

I’m sure my editor will forgive me, someday.

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Dawn of Steam: First Light is now available in paperback and Kindle editions.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/149427650X

Coming in fall 2014