Category: Falconstar Trilogy

Writing full-time over the summer

My parents were both high school teachers, and they told me that the three best things about being a teacher are: June, July, and August. My wife is a BYU professor, so she’s got a two month break instead of a three month break, but she can take it anytime over the summer, and she’s decided to start it next week. That way, she’ll be watching the kids from the end of BYU kindergarten to the week after Writers Cantina in July, giving me all that time to write full-time.

I am really looking forward to it! With luck, I can finish The Unknown Sea and push far enough into Lord of the Falconstar that I can put it up for preorder before Captive of the Falconstar is released. It’s going to take a lot of work, but I think I can do it. Captive took me a total of 120 hours to write, and I’m already about a third of the way through The Unknown Sea, so I can probably finish that by the first half of June. And then, I’ll go full ahead on Lord of the Falconstar to have that trilogy well and truly done by the end of the summer.

Looking forward, we have a wedding at the end of May, and a family trip up to Idaho in the first week of June. Coeur d’Alene is a solid 10 hour drive from Orem, Utah, which is one heck of a crazy haul, but we’ve done it before, though not with three kids. We’ll only be there for a weekend. Other than that, we’ll be at home for most of that time. So that’s the plan.

As for The Unknown Sea, it’s coming along very well, but I only have another half hour to work on it before it’s time to put the kids to bed, so I’d better get back to that now.

Is Captive of the Falconstar For You?

Is Captive of the Falconstar for you?

Captive of the Falconstar is a dark, character-driven space opera about captivity, ambition, survival, and the brutal politics of power among the Hameji star clans. It follows Zenoba as she tries to secure her place as Queen of the Falconstar, while Sonya—still trapped as a captive servant—clings to the hope of freedom, home, and revenge. This is a tense, intimate, politically charged story for readers who like their space opera full of court intrigue, moral danger, starship raids, and emotional betrayal.

What Kind of Reader Will Love Captive of the Falconstar?

If you love dark space opera with dynastic politics, warrior star clans, arranged marriages, captivity, espionage, and power struggles inside a ruling household, then Captive of the Falconstar is probably your kind of story. This book is especially for readers who enjoy morally complicated female characters, ruthless survival choices, political marriages, pregnancy and succession stakes, revenge arcs, and stories where personal relationships become battlegrounds for control, loyalty, and identity.

What You’ll Find Inside

Inside Captive of the Falconstar, you’ll find a former captive who has remade herself into a queen, a still-captive servant who refuses to forget who she was, and a weakened star clan fighting to restore its lost power. The story moves between intimate household tension, religious prophecy, starship combat, espionage, and political maneuvering, with a mood that is dark, intense, sensual, and increasingly dangerous. The pacing balances character drama with bursts of military space opera action, making the book feel both personal and epic.

What Makes Captive of the Falconstar Different

Where many space operas focus mainly on fleets, empires, and battles, Captive of the Falconstar puts dynastic survival and household politics at the center of the conflict. It has the clan warfare and starship action of military science fiction, but the emotional engine is closer to a dark court-intrigue fantasy, where marriages, heirs, names, servants, concubines, and rival queens matter as much as weapons and ships. Readers who enjoy the political intensity of royal fantasy, but want it transplanted into a star-spanning frontier setting, will find a lot to sink their teeth into here. What sets it apart is the way it refuses to make power simple: survival, loyalty, ambition, love, and coercion are all tangled together aboard the Falconstar.

What You Won’t Find

This is not a light, cozy, or comfort-read space adventure. It deals directly with captivity, slavery, sexual power dynamics, coercion, polygyny, pregnancy, revenge, and morally compromised choices, so readers looking for clean-cut heroes or a straightforward romance may not be the right fit. You also won’t find a simple “escape from the villains” story—the book is much more interested in what captivity does to identity, and what people become when power is the only protection they can find.

Why I Think You Might Love It

I think this story matters because it pushes the questions from Queen of the Falconstar even further: what happens when a woman survives by becoming ruthlessly competent, only to discover that the system she has mastered can still turn against her? Zenoba fascinates me because she is brilliant, dangerous, and deeply human, while Sonya gives the story its wounded conscience and its hunger for justice. If you like stories about power, identity, survival, and the terrible cost of becoming what the world demands, I think Captive of the Falconstar will stay with you.

Where to Get the Book

Related Posts and Pages

Explore the series index for the Falconstar Trilogy.

Return to the book page for Captive of the Falconstar.

Back to writing fantasy

Now that I’ve finished Captive of the Falconstar, I’m back to writing fantasy again, this time The Unknown Sea from the Sea Mage Cycle. I was going to focus on The Soulbond and the Sling, but this book is much shorter, and I think I can have it up for preorder by the time Captive goes live. It’s also about a quarter of the way finished already, so finishing it will only take a little push.

What I really don’t want to do is spend six months working on a WIP that I won’t be able to release this year, or maybe even next year, only to have my sales fall off a cliff because I haven’t been publishing anything. Which means that there may never be a good time to work on The Soulbond and the Sling (or The People of the Last Harvest, for that matter), but if I can set up a few long-term preorders, that may give me the space I need. I’m also going to try making it a side project and working on it on the side, for those rare times when I get an extra hour or two.

There are two more science fiction books that I plan to write: Lord of the Falconstar and Return of the Starborn Son. Both of those will complete a trilogy (The Falconstar Trilogy and the Outworld Trilogy, respectively). But I plan to intersperse those projects with fantasy WIPs, so that I’ll alternate between fantasy and science fiction until those unfinished trilogies are all complete. And then, I’ll focus exclusively on writing fantasy.

The Unknown Sea shouldn’t take long to finish, though the AI draft is rougher than I remember it being. I suppose that means I’m getting better at this, since my older work now seems so much worse. All that really means is that the human draft will take longer, since I’ll fix it all up and make it good for the final draft. But I don’t think I will be finished with this WIP until at least the end of June, and probably the end of July.

My wife plans to fill out her 10 month contract on schedule, giving her two months off in the summer. That should give me July and most of August to write full-time. Perhaps that will be a good chance to work on The Soulbond and the Sling, or finish up Lord of the Falconstar quickly enough that I can put it on a long-term preorder and spend the next six months working on the Soulbound King books. We’ll see how it goes.

Captive of the Falconstar is complete!

I just finished it this morning. The final draft clocks in at twelve chapters, 63 scenes, and 64,372 words (or approximately 220 pages, though I still need to typeset it). I’ll send it off to my editor later today.

Next WIP(s): The Soulbond and the Sling and The Soulbond and the Lady.

Ruthless Female Competence in Queen of the Falconstar

What does it take for a woman to survive when every safe, familiar, and comfortable part of her life is stripped away? In Queen of the Falconstar, Zlata is not the strongest person in the room, the most powerful, or the most protected—but she is often the quickest to see the truth of a situation and adapt to it. Her story is about ruthless female competence: the kind of intelligence, self-control, ambition, and strategic courage that can turn captivity into opportunity.

Where the Idea Came From

The part of this story that excited me most from the beginning was Zlata herself. I wanted to write a heroine who was crafty, pragmatic, resourceful, slightly pessimistic, and above all realistic—someone who accepts the world as it is, even when that world is ugly, and prepares herself to deal with it accordingly. She is ruthless when she needs to be, but not because she enjoys cruelty. Her ruthlessness comes from clarity: she sees what is happening, measures the danger, and does what she believes must be done. That made her a fascinating character to follow into a story full of slavery, sex, power, polygamy, captivity, and survival—dark material that I struggled for years to handle tastefully, but couldn’t quite let go.

How Ruthless Female Competence Shapes the Story

At the beginning of Queen of the Falconstar, Zlata is trapped in a small, stagnant world where competence is useful but unrewarded. On Graznav Station, she works under people who are lazy, complacent, or protected by patronage. She understands how fragile the station really is. She knows how to solve problems that other people ignore. But she has no real authority, no path upward, and no way to become the woman she knows she could be. Her frustration is not simply that she wants adventure; it is that she wants a life where competence matters.

That changes when the Valdamar star clan raids her home and carries her away captive. On the Falconstar, Zlata enters a brutal hierarchy where weakness can destroy you, but usefulness can raise you. She studies the ship, the clan, the customs, the politics, and the people around her. She learns when to submit, when to resist, when to speak, when to remain silent, and when to strike. Her rise from Zlata to Zenoba is not a simple empowerment fantasy. It is a dangerous transformation. She survives by making herself indispensable, but every step upward requires her to become harder, sharper, and more willing to play by the rules of a ruthless world.

That is why her relationship with Sonya is so important. Sonya reminds us what captivity costs emotionally, while Zlata shows what it takes to survive strategically. Zlata protects Sonya, but she also frightens her. She becomes powerful enough to save her friend, but also powerful enough to command her. By the end, Zlata has not merely escaped victimhood—she has become Lady Zenoba, Queen of the Falconstar. The victory is real, but it is not innocent. Her competence saves her life, earns her a place, and gives her power, but it also changes the way she sees herself and everyone around her.

What This Theme Says About Us

Ruthless female competence speaks to a deep human question: what do we do when the world does not reward goodness, innocence, or fairness? Some people break. Some people retreat into fantasy. Some people become cruel. But others learn to see clearly, act decisively, and carve out a place for themselves without waiting for permission. Zlata’s story does not pretend that power is clean or survival is simple. It asks whether a woman can become strong enough to rule without losing the part of herself that first made her worth following.

Why This Theme Matters to Me

Zlata mattered to me because she would not leave me alone. Even when I had doubts about the story, even when I trunked the project, even when the darker material made me question whether I could handle it the right way, I kept coming back to her. I loved the challenge of writing a woman who is not soft, sentimental, or conventionally heroic, but who is still deeply compelling because she sees reality and refuses to be crushed by it. In many ways, Queen of the Falconstar exists because I wanted to know what would happen if a woman like Zlata were thrown into one of the harshest societies I could imagine—and whether she would survive it, escape it, or learn how to rule it.

Where to Get the Book

Related Posts and Pages

Explore the series index for the Falconstar Trilogy.

Return to the book page for Queen of the Falconstar.

Is Queen of the Falconstar for You?

Queen of the Falconstar is a character-driven space opera about captivity, survival, ambition, and the dangerous opportunities that can open when your old life is stripped away. If you like science fiction that combines starships and interstellar raiders with sharp psychological conflict, high-stakes power struggles, and a heroine who refuses to stay powerless, this book may be for you.

What Kind of Reader Will Love This Book?

If you love…

  • space opera with frontier-colony danger, raiders, and starfaring clan politics
  • character-driven science fiction about survival, adaptation, and rising through a hostile system
  • intelligent, pragmatic heroines who think their way through impossible situations
  • morally complicated stories where safety, loyalty, love, and ambition collide
  • tense emotional dynamics involving captivity, power imbalance, and hard choices

…then Queen of the Falconstar is probably your kind of story.

What You’ll Find Inside

At the center of the story is Zlata, a restless young woman trapped in a dead-end life on an isolated mining station, who is suddenly carried away captive when raiders attack her home. What follows is a tense emotional journey through fear, culture shock, survival, and ruthless self-reinvention, as she realizes that if she wants any future at all, she will have to make herself indispensable. The tone is intense, intimate, and often morally thorny, with a style that is fast-moving, psychologically focused, and grounded more in strategy, character tension, and social maneuvering than in large-scale battlefield spectacle.

What Makes It Different

Fans of space opera will recognize the appeal of starships, frontier colonies, and interstellar conflict, but Queen of the Falconstar takes those elements in a more intimate and socially dangerous direction. Where many science fiction adventure stories focus on external missions or military campaigns, this one leans into captivity, hierarchy, cultural assimilation, and the question of how much of yourself you can surrender without losing your soul. It also stands apart through Zlata herself: she is not a conventional idealist or rebel, but a pragmatic realist whose strength comes from clear-eyed adaptation. The result is a space opera that feels personal, volatile, and psychologically charged.

What You Won’t Find

You won’t find a lighthearted or clean-edged adventure here. This book deals with slavery, sexual threat, coercive power structures, and polygamy-adjacent marriage politics, though it aims to handle those elements seriously rather than gratuitously. You also won’t find a simple good-versus-evil story, since much of the tension comes from navigating a brutal world where survival often depends on morally compromised choices.

Why I Think You Might Love It

This story mattered to me because I could never quite let it go. Zlata especially stayed with me: she’s crafty, pragmatic, resourceful, slightly pessimistic, and ruthless when she needs to be, but she’s also trying to face reality as it is and survive it on purpose. I think this book will connect most strongly with readers who are drawn to stories about what a person becomes under pressure, and about the strange, dangerous line between being conquered and choosing to rise.

Where to Get the Book

Related Posts and Pages

Explore the series index for the Falconstar Trilogy.

Return to the book page for Queen of the Falconstar.

Sorry

Wow, it’s been a while since I posted to this blog. I was just about to get back in the saddle, after finishing the rough human draft of Captive of the Falconstar, but then things got a little crazy and I dropped the ball.

What happened? Well, I got into a minor accident where I bent the family car’s door out of shape, and that took about a week and $1500ish to solve. Our 6 month-old also came down with croup (again) and an ear infection, so that wasn’t fun—he’s much better now, though, fortunately. Classes ended for my wife, and now she has to grade a bazillion papers. And finally, we had taxes, which were so complicated this year that we found the limit of what Free Fillable Forms can and can’t do. So that was crazy.

On the writing end of things, I tried and failed to juggle four different projects at the same time, so that threw things off a ton. So instead of trying to keep that up, I decided to focus on Captive of the Falconstar and all the prewriting/outlining for The People of the Last Harvest. Both of those projects went really well, actually, and I’m back at a place where I think I can start doing some token work on the other two WIPs as well.

Basically, the plan is to cut the daily workload for Captive in half, and put off Last Harvest until Captive is done and off to the editor. At that point, I’ll turn my focus to The Soulbond and the Sling and The Soulbond and the Lady. Until then, I’ll just do token work on those two—just the minimum amount to keep my writing skills warm enough that I can hit the ground running once Captive is well and truly done.

I guess I just thought I could do all the revisions and polishing work for Captive of the Falconstar in two short weeks. I’ve done it before, for some of the Sea Mage Cycle books, but those were super short and I also didn’t have nearly as much family stuff going on at the time.

So yeah, underestimating the workload was probably what led to crashing out. But I’ve got a much better handle on it now, and I think I can finish Captive before the end of the month, even while doing token work on the other WIPs. And I also need to catch up on some publishing things, like writing and sending out another author newsletter, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. Just an hour a day should catch up with that in about a week.

As a side note, I am SUPER excited to work on The People of the Last Harvest. I’ve got all the Sudowrite fields filled out (except the outline, which won’t take long), so now all I have to do is go through and write the scene prompts to generate each chapter. Once I’ve got a rough AI draft, I plan to run it through a bunch of the Author Media Patrol Toolbox tools, like the Zeitgeist Vibe Checker, the Not A Developmental Editor, and the Roast Engine to figure out which changes to make. With that, I’ll go through and make the necessary changes to generate a better AI draft, and go from there.

Also, I should probably mention that I’m planning to attend the 2027 Novel Marketing Conference in Austin this coming January. Just bought the tickets for that. And of course, I’ll be at Writers Cantina in July, as a panelist.

The kids are screaming, so I’d better go check on that and make sure my wife isn’t too overwhelmed. Take care! I’ll start posting regularly again next week, probably.

Playing Catch-up

It’s been a crazy week. On Tuesday, I had a minor accident with the family car, where I tried to step out while the car was in reverse, and the front door impacted a wall and got bent out of shape. So that threw off the whole day, and put us out more than a grand, which is why I haven’t gotten back to blogging daily. But hopefully that will change as I catch up on things.

Right now, I’m juggling three WIPs, which is a little crazy. Fortunately, two of them are in the same series/world, which makes it a little easier, but not by much.

I was hoping to finish this WIP completely by the end of the week, but now that’s obviously not going to happen. With my wife busy finishing up her classes for the semester, leaving me to watch the kids most of the day, it’s realistically going to take the rest of the month to finish this book. Which is fine, but a little frustrating.

First, I need to finish the revised human draft. I’m currently in chapter 2 out of 12, but if I push I can probably finish that next week. Then, I need to do a final polish, cutting the word count down by about 10%. That might take longer, but it will probably require less brainspace, since it’s mostly just looking for unnecessary words and cutting them.

This book is currently up for preorder, so it needs to get done soon enough that I can send it out to my editor for a copy edit. It is set to release in July, which gives me three months, but the sooner it’s done, the better. For that reason, this book needs to be my priority.

This is a quick cover mock-up I made for The Soulbond and the Sling using ChatGPT. I will probably make this a J.M. Wight book, but it’s good enough for now. Definitely captures the tone and genre.

I’m working on the rough human draft for this one, which is probably going to be the most difficult draft. My hope is to finish it by June, leaving another month to do the revision draft and the final polish. So far, it’s going well, but juggling this one with the other projects is starting to get a little difficult.

I’m going to be on the Blasters and Blades podcast soon, talking about this new series, so I want to get the first four chapters to a state where I can put them into a sample excerpt, hopefully before the end of the month. That way, people who hear the podcast (or find out about it in other ways) can download the sample and sign up for my email list to be informed when the full book comes out.

I am very excited for this book, and hopeful that it will turn out well! The AI draft is already done, so I just need to translate that into the actual human draft and make it shine.

I’m also working on the AI draft for The Soulbond and the Lady, book 2 of the series, though this is a much lower priority. Basically, I’m doing just enough to keep my AI writing skills honed, and when I start the human draft of this book, after finishing The Soulbond and the Sling, I’ll focus more on finishing the AI draft for this one. But I am very excited to finish this WIP as well, since I hope to release the first three books in this series all at roughly the same time. So the sooner I can finish this one, the soon I can publish the first book.

As if that’s not enough, I’m also working on an outline for another fantasy trilogy, which I hope to generate in Sudowrite before the end of the month. Gotta use those credits before I lose them. But that’s more of a fun side project at this point—something to do after the work has been done on everything else.

At some point, I’m probably going to drop the ball on one of these WIPs. That, or I’ll put everything else on hold to finish Captive of the Falconstar, but I don’t want to do that until I have a good stretch of time and know that I can finish it quickly. In the meantime, I’m backed up on all of the regular publishing tasks, which is why I haven’t posted a new short story for the Vasicek Free Library for this month yet, but that’s coming soon. And hopefully I can get caught up on this blog too.