Origins of a Spacegirl
The road to "She's a Spacegirl!" were long and winding. I've had the basic idea of an energy being in human form since I was a kid. It's a play on an idea done numerous times over multiple formats for decades. As a young man, I never developed the idea fully.
Original art by Geoge Cotronis.
The death of David Bowie inspired me to return to the idea. Just hours after his death, I sat at home in the middle of a snowstorm as my wife and kids slept for the night. That old idea connected with my brain at that point. I started to develop a novel called The Spaceman with chapters inspired by Bowie album titles. But I quickly realized the idea was too big in scope. Too wide reaching. With a quarter of the novel done, I shelved it with no plans to return.
In the last year or so, I’ve taken a look back at my own younger years for inspiration. The 90s are a strangely unexplored time in a lot of genre fiction for whatever reason. One way, that history plays out is in the form of a partial project I will return to soon called Bad Girls, inspired by the independent wave of superhero comics of that era. But I also wanted to tell a more personal story, one tinged with life in the Midwest in a time period where a massive technological upheaval was preparing to change the way we interact forevermore.
When I bought the George Cotronis piece for the cover of Smoke & Ash, the image you see to the right was also featured on his site. The slightly haunted woman connected to a strange machine became the final piece in the maze of my brain for the connections to fire. My previous work on The Spaceman, my thoughts on more personal Midwest stories in the 90s, and that image all jelled together as one.
From that wellspring, Nat and Fiona burst forth. As soon as I had a basic plot, I knew I needed to write their meeting and their first adventure, one that swelled to twice its original planned length before I finished. In the process, I created a beautiful novella, a story of love and loss and the will to persevere.
She’s a Spacegirl! is now funding on Kickstarter and needs your support.
