So this is one of those blog slots where I normally share something I’ve been working on. The problem is, the last few weeks I’ve been held up with all sorts of things I can’t really blog about easily. So I thought I’d talk a bit more about a world I’m in the middle of creating.

This world is inhabited by a United Federations Fleet Captain called Dylan Gray. United Federations Fleet Captain Dylan Gray is a bit of a mouth full so we’ll go with Dylan or maybe Captain for the most part. As you’ve probably worked out Dylan is the Captain of a space ship. At the moment his ship is called Sapphira. That may change but not until the full length novels come out.

So far I have one story written about Dylan and his crew, called The Slave Who’d Never Been Kissed. I shared the opening a few weeks back here, and the anthology it is available in is free on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk. This isn’t the first story in the string of introduction novellas I would like to do but it stands alone well (hopefully they all will), so there’s no need to hold off reading for that reason. I also think it’s one of my better shorts as well as it being my personal favourite.

I think there will be another three of these, maybe four, which will help introduce the crew members so the full novels can get going with a whole crew. I guess that sort of makes them prequels, but I’m writing them first to get my head around the world.

And on that note, I should actually talk about the world a bit (that was the point of this post). In my head it’s pretty much an amalgamation of Star Trek, Firefly, Farscape, Stargate and pretty much everything else set in space. The Sapphira is bigger than Serenity in Firefly but smaller than the Enterprise, but is a small ship for the world Dylan is in. As he grows in his Captain role he will possibly be given larger ships to command, sort of how the navy used to give different ships to different people, and like the navy Dylan will take certain members of his crew with him, Probably the Thorian, Trell and Auraylia. I haven’t decided for sure on the other two or three officers and engineers who are named in the novella already written.

As mentioned in The Slave Who’d never been kissed, the United Federations is at war with several other alien races but also has several as allies (Trell and the Thorian aren’t entirely human), and the fleet is used to protect the allied colonies, although there’s a lot of human colonies where Dylan is stationed.

The colonies themselves range from very poor and struggling to survive to rich, successful and well protected colonies nearer the heart of the human empire. Earth still exists but I’ve not decided in what form yet. Dylan was born on one of the wealthy colonies and enrolled in the fleet acadamy at a young age. He’s basically always wanted to be a Captain in space.