That’s right, the first entry in my trilogy with Falstaff Books is out today! Make sure you grab yourself a copy and save it to Goodreads or LibraryThing!
The Starlight Contingency is Titan AE meets Nikita!
Orphaned siblings Scarlett and Duke Nam have had it rough. Cast aside by society, they’ve managed to stay afloat by being thieves on the streets of Alexandria, Virginia. Things plunge straight to Hell when a heist goes wrong and they’re on the run from the cops, but after they stumble into a nearby home to escape, something seemingly impossible happens – the house transforms into a spaceship and leaves the Earth’s orbit.
Scarlett and Duke awaken to find that they are now prisoners about the Titan International Spaceship. The Earth has been destroyed by the Bergleute des Todes, aka The Miners of Death. Scarlett and Duke are given the chance to become soldiers to fight the aliens who destroyed their world.
The only thing left for them is the hardest thing of all: Survival.
Buy it now in ebook or paperback (with free shipping!) from Falstaff or you can get it on Amazon and don’t forget to spread the word! More news to come soon, so watch this space.
Are you excited for my upcoming science fiction space travel novel with Falstaff Books? Get ready for the final excerpt below!
Orphaned siblings Scarlett and Duke Nam have had it rough. Cast aside by society, they’ve managed to stay afloat by being thieves on the streets of Alexandria, Virginia. Things plunge straight to Hell when a heist goes wrong and they’re on the run from the cops, but after they stumble into a nearby home to escape, something seemingly impossible happens – the house transforms into a spaceship and leaves the Earth’s orbit.
Scarlett and Duke awaken to find that they are now prisoners about the Titan International Spaceship. The Earth has been destroyed by the Bergleute des Todes, aka The Miners of Death. Scarlett and Duke are given the chance to become soldiers to fight the aliens who destroyed their world.
The only thing left for them is the hardest thing of all: Survival.
I awoke when I heard echoed footsteps. I rolled over on my cot to look at the door. The guard opened it and waved two fingers at me.
“Get up.”
I stood, frowning. “What’s going on?”
“You’re going to be debriefed on the situation. Hands against the wall.”
I obeyed, remaining still as he cuffed me and pushed me out the door. No blindfold this time. I logged that knowledge away for later.
At the other end of the hall, another guard hauled Scarlett out of her cell and a small part of me relaxed upon seeing her. She looked small and cold, but her brown eyes lit up when she spotted me. The guards stayed two steps behind us with their guns drawn, ordering us to walk.
“Where do you think they’re taking us?” she asked me in Korean, her voice low and filled with trepidation.
“Not sure. It might be more questioning about the Rosewoods or whatever went down last night.”
“Stop talking,” the guard snapped, jabbing me in the back with his gun. I quelled my anger and continued walking. We turned right at the corner of the jail cell and into a stairwell. I could see an elevator nearby, but they didn’t want to risk being in an isolated space with us, so we continued past it. The stairwell’s walls were concrete as well, but the floor was metal. Odd.
We went up two flights and entered another hallway. Instead of jail cells, there were what appeared to be interrogation rooms. It may have been the ones they questioned us in right after the abduction. There were large glass windows next to the door, and inside were the same white walls as our prison with metal chairs and a table across from a one-way mirror. My suspicions of being abducted by government agents seemed more and more likely.
They stopped at a room at the end of the hall, and there were two men waiting for us: Captain Hallstead and an older man I had never seen before. He wore an expensive navy suit, and his gray hair was immaculately groomed. They stood in front of a table and two chairs, which the guards instructed us to take.
Scarlett bristled at the order. “I’d rather stand.”
“Lettie,” I muttered in warning. She glanced at me and sighed, taking her seat. The guards closed the door and stood against the wall behind us. The older man watched the two of us for a handful of seconds before speaking.
“My name is General Bridgewater. I’m the commanding officer of this establishment. I’m told that you are Scarlett and Duke. Is that correct?”
We exchanged glances and then nodded. He continued. “Normally, our organization is under the kill-first-ask-questions-later policy, but recent events have caused us to reconsider this course of action.”
He slid his hands out of his pockets and pressed them against the table, lowering his voice. “However, it would be unwise to take this as a sign of weakness. We are reluctant to kill you, but if necessary, we will. Do you understand me?”
“Sir, yes, sir,” Scarlett said with the utmost sarcasm in her voice. I closed my eyes for a second, resisting the urge to kick her in the shin.
Bridgewater glanced at her. “You’re the one who’s been giving Captain Hallstead trouble, am I right?”
Scarlett’s eyes flicked to the captain. “Aw, you told him about me?”
He ignored her. “I wouldn’t quite call it trouble, sir.”
“Call it what you will. I like your spirit. I’ve seen many girls like you succeed with that kind of fire, but it won’t work here. Here, you either get with the program or you live a hard life. I can wipe your early transgressions clean if you agree to cooperate for the duration of your stay at this facility. That’s an offer for the both of you.”
“That’s very generous of you,” I said in a measured voice. “But we’d both be much happier if you showed us the door. “
Bridgewater exhaled through his nose, straightening to full height. “There is no door. That’s why we’ve brought you here. You don’t seem to have any more information for us, so it’s time to open Pandora’s box.”
He snapped his fingers. Captain Hallstead stepped forward and placed a manila folder on the table. He opened it, revealing a large photograph.
“Do you know what this is?”
“A satellite. What about it?” I answered.
“It’s not just any satellite. This is a deep space satellite constructed to explore galaxies that are too far away for us to reach as of yet. It was put into orbit over twenty years ago. It captured photos of an unidentified planet with qualities similar to Earth. We launched a campaign that year to find out if it had breathable air and other natural resources.”
“Yeah, I remember reading about this,” Scarlett said. “They were calling it Earth II. The program was canceled for vague reasons. I’m guessing you know why.”
He slid the picture aside. This time, it wasn’t a satellite. It was something that looked like a giant meteor with spikes coming out of it and an eerie blue glow at the center.
“Earth II was destroyed that same year.”
“By what? This meteor?”
“It’s not a meteor. It’s a ship.”
Both of us went completely still.
Scarlett spoke first. “Wait, wait, wait. You’re telling us that this thing is an alien spaceship?”
“Yes.”
She chuckled, shaking her head. “That’s great. Fantastic. It’s like we’re in Independence Day. Where are Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum when you need them?”
Captain Hallstead didn’t crack a smile. He kept going. “The ship has a cannon on board that harbors an energy source our scientists call Sorbatium. We believe it’s akin to solar energy, as if they are harnessing small suns. They’ve channeled it into a destructive beam. They fired at Earth II and destroyed it in less than five minutes. The ship then deployed hundreds of smaller vessels to collect the fragments of the planet’s core, which we believe they use for profit.”
“And who is they?” Scarlett asked, still heavy on skepticism.
“The astrologist who made the discovery was German. He called them the Bergleute des Todes. Miners of death. They travel from planet to planet, destroying them and gathering their core material. We knew it would only be a certain amount of time before they mined all the usable planets in that galaxy and started coming for ours. That’s when the Starlight Contingency was put into motion. We selected one hundred million citizens of Earth to be the continuation of mankind if our military force failed against the Bergleute. In secret, their homes were converted into our most advanced space shuttles and outfitted with equipment for an immediate exit of the solar system. The Rosewoods were part of that one hundred million, but your intervention brings that number up to one hundred million and two.”
“So what now?” Scarlett interrupted. “We become soldiers in the war against the Bergs? For great justice? Give me a fucking break here. How stupid do you think we are?”
Hallstead’s eyes narrowed a bit. “You really don’t want me to answer that.”
She glared. “Bite me, pretty boy.”
“Is there a point to this conversation?” I interjected, trying to stop their squabbling.
Hallstead cleared his throat, taking a deep breath. “Last night, the Bergleute made their way into our solar system. We launched a full assault on them. Every single shuttle was destroyed, and not just ours. France, Germany, Russia, Japan, China, Korea…everyone’s. We had no other choice. We launched the Starlight Contingency after the last infantry fell.”
“Then what? You need us so you can launch another attack before they blow up the Earth?”
“You don’t understand. The Earth was destroyed six hours ago.”
My sister couldn’t hold it in anymore. She burst out laughing, loud and unbridled. It took her a moment to get it under control, talking through giggles. “This is amazing. I mean, I’ve never heard such a load of shit in my life. If you want us to work for you, just say so. You didn’t have to come up with such an elaborate ruse.”
General Bridgewater snapped his fingers again, this time at the guards. “Take them topside. Now.”
“Yes, sir.”
The guards hauled us to our feet and shoved us out the door. Captain Hallstead and the general trailed us. This time, we used the elevator instead of the stairs. Both men were relatively certain we wouldn’t try anything in their presence, it seemed. I could attest to this but Scarlett…not so much. She retained a look of bemusement at the serious expressions on everyone’s face. I couldn’t blame her. Their story was laughable and had little evidence to support it. I suspected it was part of a larger scheme of brainwashing. I was vulnerable to many things, but manipulation was seldom one of them.
We rose for several minutes. My eyebrow started to lift when I noticed we were now in the twenties. The elevator was all metal, no windows, so I couldn’t see the outside. However, the fact that it was about fifteen feet across in both directions certainly roused my suspicion.
Finally, we hit the thirtieth floor and the doors opened. For a second, I didn’t move.
It looked like the docking bay of a ship, but not a seafaring ship—a spaceship.
There were at least thirty different consoles where men and women in dark blue jumpsuits sat wearing headsets and monitoring digital screens.
Captain Hallstead and General Bridgewater walked in, and the guards nudged my sister and I forward. By now, the skeptical expression on Scarlett’s face had subsided and she began to look unnerved.
The two men walked to the front of the deck, and we followed, staring at the sight before us. General Bridgewater brandished a hand at everything before us.
“Welcome to the Titan.”
There were windows at least twenty feet high in front of us, and beyond them was a sky so black that it felt like night itself stretched across my vision. There was only one thing breaking up the blanket of darkness. To the right, I could see the atmosphere of a moon of some sort—its surface a pale orange. I had never seen anything like it. Stars sparkled out in the distance, but none of it looked familiar. These were not our stars. I had seen them as a child, studying charts in my science classes and naming their patterns while my mother hovered over me, smiling.
“Hey, Duke,” Scarlett said next to me in an alarmingly detached sort of voice.
“Yeah?” I whispered.
“This looks kind of…real.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I thought it was just me.”
Then Scarlett went limp and started to fall. The guards reached for her, but Captain Hallstead caught her with an expression on his face between surprise and pity. She had actually fainted. Not that I blamed her. The blood had retreated from my face, and I could feel dread filling my stomach like cold poison.
“Take her to the infirmary,” General Bridgewater said impassively. “Let me know when she revives.” He might have been used to seeing reactions like this, especially if this wasn’t an illusion.
Captain Hallstead handed my sister over to one of the guards, his eyes lingering as the man carried her out. I tried to read his expression, but it was like taking impression from stone: flat, lifeless, cold. But there was something there. I just didn’t know what.
“Do you have any questions, son?”
I glanced up at General Bridgewater and had to swallow before I could answer. Even then, my voice wavered. “Do you have…footage of Earth’s destruction? I’ll admit that I am starting to believe you, but this could still be some sort of elaborate ruse.”
The general turned and motioned to a wide circular console different from the ones the crewmembers were using. He touched his fingertip to the surface, and an enormous 3D digital map appeared. Briefly, I saw the coordinates for where we were in space and then he switched to a feed from a satellite.
“This is the last footage we received before it happened. It’s from one of our satellites. I’m sure other countries have their own versions of it as well. By the time the Bergleute entered the solar system, the ships including the Starlight Contingency had already evacuated the Earth.”
The satellite showed the surface of the Earth as I always remembered it—seeming to hang in the darkness of space like a sapphire. The upper corner of the globe began to darken, confusing me until I realized it was a shadow from the alien cruiser. The satellite wasn’t facing it so I couldn’t catch a glimpse, but I knew it was there. I saw a bright flash and then a red beam burrowed into one side of the planet. My stomach jerked inside me at the sight of the land crumbling and the seas boiling in its wake. It had disintegrated part of Asia already, and there were burning waves climbing outward from the entry point. After a few minutes, the beam burst out the other side of the planet and the tectonic plates of the Earth’s surface began to crack apart. Bright yellow and orange spurted from the cracks, evidence of the planet’s core peeking through as the weapon ripped it apart from the inside. At last, it exploded, and the satellite feed went to static.
General Bridgewater closed the feed. He showed no emotion at seeing it. I got the feeling he had watched it a hundred times, his pale eyes filling the world just before it turned into nothing more than rocks and dust.
“General Bridgewater,” I said. “If this is some sort of trick, understand that I will do everything in my power to end your life.”
He nodded. I wiped my eyes and straightened my posture. “Then consider this my agreement to cooperate with your operation. I can’t say the same thing for my sister, but I will do what is needed as long as I am on this vessel.”
“Good man. Escort him to the barracks.”
The guard reached for me, but I held up my hands. “What is going to happen to Scarlett?”
General Bridgewater glanced at Captain Hallstead, and he answered instead. “She needs to be examined for psychological damage, and if she chooses to play ball, she’ll be placed in the women’s division aboard this ship. You’re both going to become soldiers.”
“I need to be able to see her. She won’t recover as quickly without me.”
Captain Hallstead paused, seeming unsure. “We’ll see if we can make arrangements, but as of now she won’t be released until we’re sure she’s stable. A lot of people suffer from PTSD after seeing the world destroyed. We’ll keep her safe.”
I stepped forward, unafraid. “I want your word on that, Captain.”
He met my eyes. “You have my word.”
I let the guard take me back to the elevator and lead me to my new home. The only home I had left.
There are two kinds of people in this world. People who find this hot and liars.
First things first: Happy New Year!
This past Friday, I unfortunately had to say goodbye to one of my absolute favorite television shows. Nikita is a spy thriller show on the CW, and one of the only good things on that entire channel. It’s by no stretch perfect, as I will elaborate on in just a moment, but it was one of the most atypical shows on that particular network. The CW typically panders to the teenage girl demographic, and Nikita was a fresh breath of air for all four seasons. I’d like to honor its memory by discussing the things in the show that helped me as a writer.
Massive spoilers ahead. Ye be warned.
Beware the Mary Sue. For the non-writers out there, a “Mary Sue” is an original character who is poorly written and exemplifies traits of an inexperienced writer who doesn’t understand how to make a character three dimensional. Mary Sue characters are often the most beautiful, funniest, quirkiest, smartest, and powerful among any of the people around them. They are written like goddesses and most of the time, the other characters either irrationally hate them in order to serve as a foil for how “awesome” they are, or everyone loves them and constantly praises them. This term is thrown around too often in the fiction and fanfiction world, especially if said character is based on the author, but it’s still an important mainstay in the writing world for a reason.
Nikita managed to avert the Mary Sue character with one character and then embodied it with another. Here’s the skinny, in case you skipped the 1990 original film (La Femme Nikita by Luc Besson) that the show is loosely based on: Nikita Mears was a drug addict who killed a cop and was sentenced to death. However, after her faked lethal injection, she woke up in an underground facility in the hands of a covert government agency called Division, headed by Percy, Amanda, and Michael, respectively. They take felons with the death sentence, rehabilitate them, and turn them into undercover spies and assassins to do the U.S. government’s dirty work off the books. After getting clean, Nikita quickly became Division’s best agent, but she eventually fell in love with a guy named Daniel. Relationships with outsiders are forbidden, so Division killed Daniel and Nikita broke out and swore revenge. She recruits a young girl named Alexandra Udinov to infiltrate Division and help her tear it to the ground.
Nikita has all the makings of a Mary Sue—an absurd wealth of beauty, a sharp tactical mind, bad ass martial arts skills, fluency in several languages, and genuinely a good heart—but the show recognized what makes a great character and instead made her three dimensional. For instance, Nikita’s biggest character flaw is that she has a serious guilt complex. There have been plenty of missions she failed or battles she lost because she is so obsessed with saving everyone that even one loss is beyond her comprehension. She also has deep rooted self-esteem issues brought on by the darkness inside her that Division cultivated and brought out of her in her earlier years. The reason why she’s such a fantastic leading lady is that she often questions her own actions, has doubts and fears, and makes mistakes that affect herself and her team. She is a loner, but she also falls in love with the second-in-command at Division, Michael, and spends the entire first season trying to get him to see the error of his ways. Nikita is self-sacrificing to a fault and the show does a wonderful job showing the repercussions of making decisions for other people instead of trusting them.
On the other hand, Alex is the biggest Mary Sue I’ve seen on television in ages. Her backstory reeks of bad writing. For instance, her father was a Russian arms dealer and head of a multimillion dollar company. Division stormed his manor to kill him and his family, but Nikita couldn’t bring herself to shoot Alex in cold blood so she saved her and ran away from Division. Alex constantly screws up missions in the first season, but she always avoids “cancellation” (which is what Division does if an agent doesn’t get with the program) through incredibly stupid, contrived situations rather than using her own smarts or skills. In the second season, she gets even dumber and works with Division to hunt Nikita because she found out Nikita killed her father before saving her life. She claims that she’s using Division instead of the other way around and continues playing right into their schemes up until the very end of the season where she gets some sense knocked into her. Then she gets brainwashed by Amanda, Division’s psychotic psychiatric assessment agent, and becomes so obsessed with “freeing” the agents at Division that she sabotages Nikita’s plans, shoots a supporting character and nearly kills him, incites a mutiny, and gets her own love interest killed. She is everything that Nikita is not—incapable, snotty, selfish, short-sighted, and constantly getting everyone else in trouble.
Nikita has its fair share of problems, but the differences between Nikita and Alex are what leave the biggest impression on me from a writing standpoint. It’s very easy to lose grip on a grounded character and create a Mary Sue. Writers do it all the time. The key is balancing out the good with the bad. Every character has traits that make them worthwhile, and traits that make you want to smash their head against a concrete wall. They need to have realistic faults and shortcomings. They need to be human and mess up and work hard to atone for their sins. Writers tend to put some characters on pedestals out of habit and love of their work, but if we want people to enjoy them, we have to bump them off it.
Understand the scope and duration of your storylines. One of the absolute hardest things about writing the final novel in my Black Parade series is knowing the limitations of the story. Nikita has definitely struggled with this in the past.
For instance, the first two seasons are by far the strongest because they have an insidious main villain (Percy), a steamy love affair with all kinds of Dating Catwoman vibes (Michael and Nikita), a lovable team of ass-kicking misfits (Birkhoff, Ryan, Nikita, Owen, Sean, and Michael, and I don’t count Alex because she sucks), and a pretty straightforward plot. Season three falls apart after the death of Percy because while the old bastard was starting to get tiresome (he had a very Lex Luthor way of getting out of every single scrape by talking his way out), Amanda is just not main villain material. She’s far too one-note and she was incapable of seeing the big picture the way that Percy did when he ran Division. He knew exactly how to manipulate the agents and how to make them think they were helping their country when they were really just serving his needs.
The idea that the show did well with in the third season was that Division could be used for good instead of evil, and the team struggled with that from start to finish. However, the story wore thin as the mutiny and the brainwashing and Amanda’s creepy obsession with Nikita began to take over. The end of season three had some pretty soap opera level types of drama, especially the plotline with Michael’s bionic hand, and any of the realism the show used to have dried up. By the time season four hit, it was pretty clear that the series had run out of gas.
Pacing is vital to a good book. One has to know how to intersperse action, dialogue, inner conflict, and other story elements in a way that keeps the audience’s attention. This is why a lot of writers suggest outlining the novel before one starts it because it can help keep the reins firmly in the author’s grasp. It’s easy to slip off into a tangent with your story if you don’t have all the details. You don’t want your story to be derivative, so it’s important to explore all the limitations of your world and then decide how to trail blaze.
Choose your villain carefully. Percy is one of the best TV villains I’ve seen in years. He’s got all the calm, cool demeanor of Lex Luthor with the vicious killing streak of Darkseid. Even though Nikita constantly foiled his plans, he always found a way to profit off of his losses. He could talk his way out of damn near anything, and he also managed to stay detached from his emotions, meaning he had no weak points. He was such a slimy bastard that I’m sure we were all cheering when Nikita dropped his ass down that silo to plummet to his death.
However, Amanda’s shift into the main villain seat was misguided, in my opinion. Amanda shifted between second in command and third in command while Percy was still running Division, and it worked because of her skill set. She knew how to influence the recruits and get what she wanted out of them with persuasion, and occasionally, force. However, she got too ambitious and turned on Percy because of her own massive ego. I appreciate that the show didn’t want Percy to be the source of conflict for the entire show’s run, but Amanda didn’t have the panache to pull it off. She was certainly a cold hearted bitch with no remorse and no morals, but she didn’t know how to truly run Division effectively.
I believe a commonly used quote in the writing world is that “every villain is a hero in their own story.” Villains need to get beneath our skin. We need to hate them or fear them at the end of the day. Sometimes all one needs is a one note villain with an end goal of world domination, but the better villains are the ones who have at least one redeeming quality. Percy and Amanda didn’t have those, but plenty of the antagonists in Nikita’s world did. After all, a hero is only as good as their evil counterpart. If one fleshes out the protagonist, one needs to flesh out the antagonist. However, Nikita did do something I enjoyed—they didn’t expose anything about Percy on a real level. We didn’t find out his last name or his childhood. He was just an imposing asshole and that worked because it kept the mystery. Less is more with villains like him, and this show understood that very well.
Make sure your supporting cast is actually supportive. Team Nikita is pretty awesome, all things considered. You have Birkhoff, aka Nerd, who heads up all the technological aspects; Ryan, who handles deployment of the agents and knows how to dig through the government for answers; Sean, who is basically extra muscle; Michael, who is the tactical genius leader guy and Nikita’s moral center; Alex, who is Nikita’s lesser half but still helps out despite being a massive idiot. This brings me to Owen—an agent whose job was to clean up messes and get rid of trace evidence after certain assassinations. Owen had been put on a regiment of rare vitamins and substances that made him faster and stronger than the average bear, but then he got in trouble and defected after Division killed his girlfriend. Nikita later recruits him because of her savior complex, to my complete exasperation.
The problem with Owen is that he doesn’t really pull his weight. The other members of Team Nikita have solid, set purposes and roles. They all do something that is needed on their missions. Owen, however, isn’t much use most of the time. He’s irrational, hot-headed, impulsive, and smug. He rarely thinks ahead and without the regimen, he was no longer super-strong or fast. He was by far the most extraneous character on the show. It seems as if he was brought in as a regular in order to cause tension (at one point, he seemed to take a shine to Nikita while she and Michael were having relationship issues), but at the end of the day, you could remove him entirely and not much would change.
This can sometimes happen in stories with ensemble casts. Authors tend to want to show a diverse spread of characters with their own quirks. Sometimes they can get so wrapped up a character’s personality that they forget to actually make them relevant to the plot. It’s easy enough to fix—often times, one can combine two characters into one, or remove the character entirely and just save them for another story. Owen is a constant reminder to always make sure to tie each character into the plot with their own thread. Otherwise, what are they there for?
I’m honestly in mourning for Nikita. While they went out on a fantastic finale, it’s hard to see it go when there are so few unique shows out there. Here’s to you, Nikita. Thanks for the memories.
Kyoko
Support Kyoko M
Please support me on Ko-fi!
Subscribe to our mailing list and get any one of Kyoko M.\'s novels for FREE!
