Now that To Discover and Preserve is at retail, I can talk a little about one of the amusing branches in history that happened when pre-publication Jaguar started contemplating her career plans. Writing a military SF series about Alysha had been my plan since high school, when I first wrote the stories that would end up in Alysha’s Fall. Throughout high school I wrote a succession of shorts about her, all part of that plan… and then, in the late 90s, I got the idea for her first full-length novel (Sword of the Alliance).

When tradpub stymied my efforts to reach my audience, I turned to short stories, then considered a viable route to a book deal: get your name out and you’ll be a better bet. Though I disliked short fiction, I spent a lot of time reading back issues of magazines to get a feel for what editors were buying, and one of my unexpected discoveries was that magazines bought stories with recurring characters, as if they were episodes in a tv show. Readers of Asimov’s or Analog could look forward to another story about Character X, which also functioned as a standalone for new readers.

‘Here,’ I thought, ‘is a style I can swing… and milsf would make a great source of standalone adventures! But I need a character for an audience that probably won’t take a giant cat woman seriously.’

That’s how Wyatt happened. I designed him as the perfect viewpoint character for the setting: here was a human, new to the Pelted Fleet and in a position to call out all its weirdnesses. When you read “Stormfront” with that aim in mind, you can see all the bits I dropped in, intending to make sense of the Peltedverse for new readers… and it worked, because “Stormfront” sold to a magazine. ‘Huh!’ said I. ‘Maybe this is the right character to spearhead the military arm of the Peltedverse!’ Excited, I started on a “sequel” episode to that story… and never finished it. Part of that was because I ran into some ‘this is hard to write’ issues. Part of it was that short fiction always took a backseat to my novel-writing endeavors, and I was committed to writing as many Book 1s as it would take to entice an editor into taking a chance on me.

But it took me years—decades!—to understand the final reason, which is that the Wyatt stories weren’t enough of what made the Peltedverse unique. There are lots of milsf series with human characters doing cool stuff. It didn’t matter that Wyatt was doing cool stuff in an interesting setting… he still wasn’t much different from his peers in the genre.

Alysha, on the other hand, is the spirit of the Peltedverse: she’s a product of its strange history, her backstory is deeply involved with human/Pelted conflicts and politics, and by making her the observer of how strange the Pelted Fleet is, because of her association with humans, I accidentally reversed the fish-out-of-water trope while preserving its flavor. It works, and it supplied the thematic arc for the Stardancer novels: this is about a group of people deciding who they are, and what they want to stand for, and how much of their culture is working for them and how much could use amendment.

Teen Me was unashamedly all about the catgirl captain. College Me backpedaled, thinking it made her sound un-serious. Older Me has concluded Teen Me was right, and that questioning her artistic instincts resulted in a compromise that pleased no one.

The funny part is that Older Me, acknowledging that... likes the Wyatt story! When the collection Kickstarter closed, I had funding for three extra short stories, which I wrote. But even though I’d already turned in those three, I went back to the abandoned Wyatt sequel, rewrote the beginning, and finished it off, as a present to myself (and readers: an unexpected bonus story). Because I like Wyatt, and I think his thread has potential. Alysha has an arc to complete, but Wyatt would make a great spin-off/secondary series, the way Lisinthir, Jahir, and Hirianthial (and soon, Surela) can have their series, all revolving around the same issues but coming at them from different directions.

“Gaps” might be my favorite story in the collection, in fact. Maybe because it’s not trying to be anything other than what it is; like those early Alysha stories, I wrote it because I thought it would be interesting, not to serve any purpose, or anticipate any reader need. As an Alysha replacement, Wyatt was a failure. As his own creature, he’s pretty awesome. Or at least, I think.

Anyway, if you haven’t picked up the collection, check it out and tell me what you think of Wyatt! Would you like to see more of him?