Just dropping by to let y'all know the novel has been released. You can find more about the release (including download links) at the Oktopod blog.

Thanks again for your support, and take care!

~Chris

She's dead, Jim.

Well, here we are. The project ends in about 27 hours, give or take. I can now say with confidence that it will fail, and I feel a bit strange sitting here at the end, wistfully looking back. There was a rush of support and euphoria in the beginning, and I found myself facing a future bright with possibility. That brightness faded fast over the following 30 days, though.

This project was my attempt to short-circuit a problem that's been vexing me: no one wants to listen to authors promoting their own work. Any website with useful traffic has strict rules against self-promotion, and they ignore any emails with even a scant scent of it. Of course, they're all more than happy to sell ad space, but that takes money I don't have. Thus the project.

More than anything, this entire adventure has been an exercise in frustration. I found it impossible to get any kind of coverage, and I currently have a small collection of unanswered emails in my sent box, some of which were to websites who honestly had nothing better to do with their time. Turns out they'd rather post nothing at all than give me the time of day.

Perhaps it was the tone of my emails, which were always rude, packed with death threats, and occasionally smelled of arsenic (don't ask how I accomplished that last part). Maybe it was the nekkid photos of myself plastered everywhere on my site, or it could be that those photos simply weren't explicit enough. It's impossible to know for sure, and a man could drive himself mad by guessing.

This update is a bit too down in the mouth, though, so let's take that frown and turn it upside down. On the silver lining side of things, the project succeeded in raising nearly $1,000, although a very large chunk of that was expressly for the purpose of hitting the Monkey Dance Quota. I think I've also come to grips with seeing myself on camera, which is certainly a victory for my self-confidence, and brings me one step closer to my life-long dream of appearing in a burlesque show.

Best of all, I got to jabber ever so briefly at you 21 wonderful human beings who so generously pledged your support for my silly little project. We haven't interacted much so I've had to fill in the gaps with my imagination; in my mind's eye, you're all Greek gods with fabulously chiseled physiques, and hearts made of pure gold.

I'd hoped to send you all some kind of consolation prize, but I can't figure out any way to do that for under 6 dollars, so I hope you can settle for my undying gratitude. It's not as cool as a copy of my soon-to-be-bestseller-and-then-optioned-for-a-major-motion-picture novel, nor is it as glamorous as the black-tie event I was eventually going to host on my future yacht, but it's simple, heart-felt and sincere. Thank you.

To finish up today, here's a final excerpt, snipped out of Chapter 15: Evermore. Minor spoiler warning: This clip gives away one early mystery in the book, so skip it if you want to be totally surprised come September 20th.

She was not only a starship, but the pride of the Eireki fleet. All around, her countless brothers and sisters arrived to fill the void, and joined their voices in a song of light.

She was the queen of that light. Its keystone. Its source and destination. She was the light of stars that danced in the dark of night, and the song of creation that stood before the destroyer.

Her lover came up beside her, the prince of her race who so often wandered the void in solitude. He radiated sadness and sorrow for the destruction soon to come, and for the peace they had failed to attain.

The chance for peace was gone. Now was the time for war.

She bowed to him and pressed forward, and her fleet raced to match. A trillion of her kind cut through the emptiness, blotting out the distant stars and carrying the entirety of the Eireki species aboard them. The Eireki who were creators and protectors, who filled her with love and life and purpose. They filled her with strength unimaginable. She and her crew, bonded through their thoughts, were one.

The enemy also rode in force, and she could feel their blight in the distance. They were the dark and twisted Nefrem. The so-called chosen children. They were destroyers, who existed only to devour and pervert the light.

Side by side, the legion of ships and their Eireki crews awaited the coming of the darkest one. The source of the destroyers. Their mother. Their living planet.

And then the enemy came, its arrival thundering across all of creation. The queen of the light bid her fleet to wait, and hide in the shadow of a gas giant. They would attack with the rising sun.

So it unfolded. The glow and warmth of the sun crested the horizon and the Eireki rode into battle. Two surging waves of ships clashed in a rain of furious, burning light, painting the void in rent flesh and the blood of the fallen.

There was death as never before, perhaps as never would be again, leaving both forces annihilated. When the firing stopped, there remained only two combatants: the vast crimson living planet, and she, the Eireki flagship in vivid green.

She kept her distance, firing on her enemy with beams that shredded space and time with their fury. It wasn’t enough. The flesh of the enemy absorbed her fire, and retaliated in kind.

Dancing in the dark of night, she avoided reprisal and sang her song of destruction, raining hell down upon the living planet and expending everything she had. Still, it wasn’t enough. There wasn’t enough power in the universe.

Then, her Eireki crew conceived of a desperate plan. An unthinkable plan. She refused to comply, but they insisted that their lives didn’t matter. Nothing could matter except stopping the Nefrem. If they failed, all life would suffer for eternity.

Reluctantly, she accepted.

She wheeled about and charged at full speed, her weapons blazing a path before her. She entered the zone of the living planet’s influence, and its tireless psychic scream burnt the minds of her crew. There was no time to mourn. She pressed forward and howled the secret name of death, firing straighter than before.

She struck the enemy hard. Her whole body rocked from the impact but she continued on, and pressed the living planet backward, back into the gas giant, back into the waiting star-seed. Then she fired as she never had, pouring energy beyond comprehension into her foe. Her hollow-drives burst under the immense strain, one after another shattering in a fitful luminescent gasp until only one remained. Then the gas giant ignited, and its shock wave flung her to safety.

She had done it. She birthed an artificial star, a fusion furnace that would burn for sixty-five million years, with the last of the Nefrem and their living planet trapped within. It was a prison from which they couldn’t escape. The star would hold them and blind their eyes until it burned out.

She scanned inside herself for any signs of life, but there were none. The last of the Eireki were dead, as were all the other ships. She was alone. Empty. Still, there was one task left to complete.

Using the last of her stored energy, she traversed the gulf between stars and arrived at a system whose existence had been carefully concealed from the Nefrem since the beginning of time. Within this system lay the garden—a miraculous world so very much like the lost Eireki home—which had been chosen to serve a new purpose. A noble purpose. On that planet, balance would be restored and the Eireki would rise anew. From the ashes would evolve a better, stronger Eireki, capable of defeating the Nefrem once and for all.

Wounded, tired and limping, she looked down on the radiant green and blue planet, and asked forgiveness for the crime she was about to commit. Within her, the golden codex fulfilled its purpose: it adapted countless gene sequences to an eons-long program, imprinted them onto a biomechanical seed and spat it at the peaceful planet below.

The seed struck hard, raising inky clouds across the globe. The destruction would bring about change and new growth, while the retroviruses it dispersed became the seeds of resurrection. It was done. Now she could sleep and dream and wait for the children of the Eireki to wake her. She could sleep for sixty-five million years.

Thanks again for reading, for pledging, and most of all for giving me a bit of much needed hope. I'll probably pop by to make one last update sometime tomorrow, but don't be surprised if it's only about 6 words long.

See you, space cowboys...

~Chris

So, here we are in the final week of my Kickstarter project, and things... well, they don't look so hot. In fact, unless there's some kind of minor miracle over the weekend, I'm going to be celebrating a crushing defeat about this time next Wednesday.

But the game isn't over yet!

Today, I've posted a fantastic new video for your viewing pleasure, which includes a special and mysterious new prize. Unlike my last video, this one features my chubby and poorly shaven visage addressing you directly, accompanied by a series of rather sarcastic subtitles that help draw attention away from my face.

The fat lady isn't singing yet!

It may just be the 12 cups of coffee talking, but I feel something special. Can you feel it? I bet you can... It's kind of like muscular tremors and a headache, and I think that feeling is VICTORY!

So, let's get this thing done. Let's redouble, nay, re-quadruple our efforts! Contact everyone you know and tell them that some heavy slacker needs their help!

We can do it!

...and if not, oh well. Grab a bottle of nice wine, pour yourself a glass, and help me celebrate defeat. :)

~Chris

I said I'd talk about the title in another update, and behold! This is that other update. Instead of just describing how the name came about, though, I thought I'd take the opportunity to explain the whole history of Stars Rain Down, from its inception in the margins of notebooks, to the final novel you'll be reading on September 20th.

That history is complicated by the fact that Stars Rain Down didn't start as just one project; it was actually four (or more) separate ideas that I eventually combined into a single, stranger whole.

Grab a snack. This is gonna be a long one...

Space Knights

The earliest and most important part was called Legacy Effect, a sci-fi project which I started brainstorming in 2000 after I saw Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Filled with frustration over what I considered Lucas' mishandling of his universe, I set out to create my own galaxy-spanning sci-fi franchise. My aim was to combine magic and technology much as Lucas had, but in a universe built with extensibility in mind, so that stories could be told from anywhere along its timeline without mangling continuity. Essentially, I was trying to craft an entire future history, from which I could cherry-pick interesting and important moments.

The universe was large and diverse, with thousands of alien races, countless habitable worlds, and a history dating back millions of years to when an ancient civilization ruled it all. In modern times, the human race had become a dominant force in the galaxy, thanks in part to the discovery of alien artifacts that jumpstarted our technological progress. Sometime after that discovery, humanity split into two powerful nations: the Earth, which became an isolationist theocracy, and the Confederated Fringe Systems, a secular melting pot of former colonies that broke away in a bloody independence war.

Hidden just beneath the surface was a covert struggle for the fate of the galaxy, waged between two orders of knights clad in living armor, who gained immense strength through the philosophy and technology of the ancients. Rather than simple good and evil, however, these two factions each believed themselves to be fighting for the greater good. They simply had different ideas about what the greater good was and how to achieve it.

It was a big, messy, difficult task... and that's probably why it never really came together.

The Hungry Planet

About a year later, I started working on the second most important component, a comic series called Nemesis Rising set in a far off solar system where Earthlings would never set foot. I envisioned it as a strange and wondrous place populated by three peaceful races who travelled from one planet to the next aboard living spaceships.

When a mythical horror called Nemesis, a monstrous living planet which devours everything in sight, returns from the void and begins its assault, a multiracial group of young people race off to retrieve the one weapon that can stop it.

I thought the core concepts of Nemesis Rising—an entire series devoid of humans, and a world where all technology is alive—were fairly revolutionary. It also dealt with themes I found intriguing, like pacifism under attack, and the dangers of dogma. Unfortunately, it ended up on a permanent backburner while other projects occupied my time.

Bleeding Machines

One subject keeps surfacing again and again: Biotechnology. At an early age, I became fascinated with the idea that machines could be constructed from living tissue, ultimately becoming more powerful and adaptable than their non-organic counterparts. I became so obsessed, in fact, that the concept shows up in virtually every science-fiction story I work on.

I developed some of these ideas further in 2003 when I started plotting out a science-fiction novel based on (don't laugh) the Transformers. I thought they offered a neat counterpoint to biotechnology, being machines designed to function like living creatures. I wanted to explore the place where these two concepts might eventually collide. What happens when technology imitates biology, and vice versa? Is there some natural end point that they would both evolve toward in parallel?

The planned novel,Transformers: Across the Sea of Ages, only ever existed as the barest of plans, but it served as a fertile garden for my imagination. Two fruits from that garden would ultimately survive: the idea that human beings were bio-engineered by an alien race for their own purposes, and that this other race had mastered genetic engineering and statistical models so completely that they could schedule the rise of specific mutations millions of years in the future.

Flood Waters Rising

By the Fall of 2005, all of these projects had been set aside in favor of my forever-in-production fantasy novel, Ebon Tide. That novel wasn't working, though, and I found myself pretty badly stalled out.

Then Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, and as I watched the catastrophe unfold on the nightly news, fresh ideas sparked to life. The problem was that none of those ideas really fit into a fantasy novel.

The question that started it all was this: Why do we send the National Guard into these situations? I grasped the need for a well drilled, government force with a strong chain of command, but the National Guard are nevertheless combat troops. They're neither trained nor equipped to deal with natural disasters.

It didn't make a lick of sense, so I started coming up with something that did. My idea was to form a global volunteer force, trained to drop into disaster areas and help the wounded. Instead of troops in camouflage with assault rifles, they'd be medics and firefighters dressed like traffic cones and equipped with first aid kits. I called them the Emergency Response Corps, or ERC.

I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to convince anyone this was a good idea, though. Instead, I started considering how the concept might work in a novel.

The Similar Title Effect

In 2007, I was getting mighty frustrated at my inability to finish Ebon Tide. The novel was supposed to combine deep world building, martial arts, spirituality and an avant-garde literary style, producing nothing less than a total renaissance in fantasy fiction. My ambitions were astronomical, and the fact that I couldn't reach them was infuriating.

The thought of aiming a little closer to Earth became attractive. I could write a more conventional science-fiction novel, which would not only give me a finished manuscript to shop around to agents, but also help me work through some of the kinks in my writing style. Right around the time I began sorting out my notes on Legacy Effect, something annoying happened... The first wave of marketing for BioWare's Mass Effect hit.

And it wasn't just the titles that were similar, either. Every new scrap of information I uncovered seemed to resemble my ideas, from the group the main character worked for to his semi-mystical abilities, and even the style of his body armor and design of his ship. The two universes certainly weren't carbon copies and there was no reason to suspect foul play, but they had more than enough in common to annoy me. I felt unoriginal, and if I finished Legacy Effect as planned, I'd likely be accused of ripping Mass Effect off.

The surprising part is that this turned out to be just the motivation I needed. With a goal of finishing my novel before Mass Effect hit shelves, I dug through my old properties, and manically went about cutting and rearranging them to fit together. After a few weeks of brainstorming and adaptation, I had sixty pages of notes detailing a universe, a cast of characters, and the plot of a novel. The world was cobbled together from a decade worth of creative flotsam and jetsam, while the plot was strongly inspired by the Iraq war, with a few dashes of a cartoon called Robotech thrown in for flavor.

With notes in hand, I closed the door to my room and went to work. About three months later, I had a finished novel.

I feel like I'm forgetting something here... Oh.

Titles

While working, the folder was always simply labeled Legacy. I knew I would have to do something about the title, but (for once in my life) I figured that could wait until I was done with the story.

Once it was finished, the title became the subject of numerous heated arguments with myself (does that sound crazy?). After throwing away dozens of ideas, I finally settled on Legacy Undying, a reference to an immortal alien spaceship that plays a key part in the plot. This title adorned the manuscripts I initially mailed off to agents.

A bit of failure sure can change your perception of things, though. The first agent sent back a form letter, and I felt a bit downtrodden. The second agent held onto the book and thought about it for six months, before finally turning me down politely. Around that time, Legacy Undying started to sound like a great title for a trashy vampire romance novel.

It was another six months before I looked into submitting the book again, this time to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. I spent a lot of time rewriting and rethinking the manuscript, and that was when I settled on Until the Stars Go Dark, a phrase I'd also worked into the dialogue. I liked the image it conjured, the determination it implied, and the sentimental value it held for one of the main characters.

Another few months disappeared while I awaited the ABNA results. My novel was eventually cut in the second round with one very positive review, and one that said it was probably pretty good for science-fiction, but the reviewer didn't care for the genre. I groaned mightily.

I was back to square one. I looked into a few more agents and toyed with the idea of mailing off more submissions, but that seemed like a long and painful game to play. I eventually decided that traditional publishing was a bad joke with a particularly cruel punchline, and I no longer wanted anything to do with it. If I was going to be successful as a writer, it would be by taking fate into my own hands, and ebooks would be the engine of that success.

In the run up to self-publishing, I modified the title one last time to give it some more punch, and that's the title I'm using today: Stars Rain Down. It retains the same basic concept, but is shorter and perhaps a little more mysterious. It feels right, and I hope you'll agree.

...and that's the Reader's Digest version of how Stars Rain Down came to be. It's missing all the gory details like what I had for breakfast, or how many hours I spent staring at the wall waiting for a good idea to come along, but it's complete enough and all true(ish). As for how all those different pieces came together in the final novel, you'll just have to wait for September 20th to find out.

Thanks for coming along for the ride. Look out for another story excerpt in the next day or so, and in the meantime, I'll leave you with a list of titles that didn't make the cut. Warning: They didn't make the cut with good reason.

• 
  
• Legacy of Fire
• 
  
• The Fires of Distant Stars
• 
  
• Starborn Legacy
• 
  
• Unvanquished
• 
  
• Legacy Immortal
• 
  
• Ex Infernis
• 
  
• Mark of the Aggressor
• 
  
• Devourer Awakened
• 
  
• Recoil
• 
  
• Elegy
• 
  
• Monsters of Reason
• 
  
• The Radiant Dark
• 
  
• Requiem Recoil
• 
  
• In the Valley Where We Die
• 
  
• When Stars Began to fall
• 
  
• Blood of Generations
• 
  
• More Than Strength Alone
• 
  
• Sorrow's Far Shore
• 
  

~Chris J. Randolph