![]() Author has written 1 story for Star Wars. My user image is the cross-section of a red cabbage that we grew at our farm in 2017. I chose it because the white ribs against the purple background looked somehow sci-fi, but the image has come to have a bigger significance: it's just an ordinary cabbage, but if you look at right, it's strange, beautiful and weird. It's an example of an idea that I find really compelling, in stories and in life: the idea that the ordinary and the strange stand side by side, the idea that even our ordinary world, if you open your eyes, is as strange as any sci-fi and as terrible and as beautiful as any fantasy. I grew up with staples of sci-fi and fantasy like Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Star Trek and Star Wars. Diane Duane's Young Wizards series is a new favourite. I've engaged in some form of writing, world-building and story-crafting off and on for most of my life, but I didn't write any long fiction until I started work on The Way of a Siluan. Writing The Way of a Siluan is my challenge to myself to become a better writer and storyteller. It's really helpful to get any feedback you'd like to share, so please do leave a review or send a message with your thoughts on my work. About The Way of a Siluan After being assigned to the AgriCorps, Jedi youngling Eo Cloudlee gets stranded on an obscure planet and begins to learn the ways of a little-known sect of Lightsiders known as the Siluans. When she later emerges to a galaxy where the Jedi are all but extinct, Sith lords rule and a Dark Jedi has vowed to destroy the Siluans, her choice to take up their way of life costs more than she expects. However, the intersection of her story with that of the former AgriCorps Jedi Devin Strong and the jaded Jedi master Varda Wahi determines the course of their struggle with the Dark Jedi Ry Kyver. Ry and Devin's stories form an agricultural sci-fi subplot. The Dark Jedi Ry Kyver, serving as Imperial Minister of Agriculture during the early years of the Empire, uses peak phosphate as an excuse to establish an Imperial monopoly over agricultural inputs and to regulate agricultural practice more closely. As Devin and others try, fail and partially succeed to counteract the results of her policies, and they begin to save what is left of the Jedi AgriCorps legacy in the aftermath of Order 66. The main characters are all OCs, but a number of canonical characters are also essential to the plot. The first seed of an idea for The Way of a Siluan came to me in January 2016, when seeing The Force Awakens reawakened my interest in Star Wars. I was browsing an old (now non-canonical) Star Wars encyclopedia when I came across an entry about the Jedi AgriCorps. According to bits in the Star Wars Legends, Jedi younglings who didn't quite make the cut to be Jedi knights could still use the Force to aid the farmers through the Jedi Agricultural Corps. I studied agriculture at university and I've been farming since 2010, so I quickly got interested in writing an agricultural sci-fi set in the SWU. That being said, I didn't really start writing in earnest until seeing Rogue One made me think about the importance of a good villain to a good story. With that thought, the Dark Jedi character Ry Kyver was born. What would happen though, when she and Eo finally crossed paths? As soon as I asked the question, I knew. With the climax of Part I (chapter 23) in mind, the rest of the story fell into place almost as if I was watching it like a movie. It has, however, taken quite a while to write. What I've posted so far is a draft of Part I that I wrote in January – October 2017 and then revised in 2018 based on feedback from a number of offline and online readers. The plot for part Part II is fully in place, but it's still an outline and some snatches of dialogue waiting to be fleshed out after Part I is finished. About the Siluans In keeping with the agricultural theme of the story, I wanted a sect of Lightsiders who respect and often work alongside the Jedi, but who take manual labour and the cultivation of the land as central practices in their way of life. Their ethos was shaped by a visit I made to two Orthodox Christian monasteries in Arizona in 2016. The simplicity, wisdom and semi-agrarian lifestyle of the monks and nuns I encountered became that of the Siluans. The phrase Yet shall the Light be unbroken echoes throughout Siluan teaching. Its role in their way of life is my attempt to give the Siluans a bit of the ethos of the hymn: Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life. An earlier version of the story was titled The Way of the Yeti, but I later wanted a name that avoids the association of the term Yeti with the cryptid. The term 'Siluan' came from casting about for sound associations that felt right, but I later discovered that 'Siluan' is an alternate spelling for 'Silouan', a name borne by St. Silouan the Athonite, whose teaching on love for one's enemies fits hand-in-glove with that of the Siluans in this story. |