I suppose I could have called this post an exploration into my writing process, but I like that title better. If it doesn’t make you a little nervous, you haven’t gotten to know me very well.

But worry not, brave explorers! This will just be a fun little trip into the shallow regions of the gray matter lodged inside my oddly shaped cranium. I may have mentioned that when I was writing my novel, I never thought ahead to figure out what was going to happen next. I wanted my hero to have to come up with the answers of how to get out of sticky situations as they came up. It was just a trick I used to keep it interesting for me and him.

Whenever the action slowed down, or I needed to add some humor, or drama or whatever, I would throw in a new alien. Creating new aliens is a lot of fun, but it is challenging. There are so many aliens in movies and TV that coming up with something new is almost impossible. You have all gotten to know the aliens from the first book fairly well. I have been doing enough silly pictures of them, and they are all up there in the button in the header bar called ‘pictures of aliens from my novel’.

When I was creating a new alien, I would first get a mental image of what they looked like. Then I would draw a rough sketch. Beside the sketch I would make little notes about how they behaved, their goals, their history, and most importantly, how they talked. Sometimes I pretended to be them, and tried talking in funny accents until I got a feel for their personalities. You might, in the upcoming books, notice that some of the characters speak like Boris and Natasha, or maybe Borat. Hey, it worked for me.

All these tricks helped the aliens come alive. They weren’t just bit players in the story, they all had real lives. Here is a sketch I did of a guy named Rubar. He is a Reaver, and his planet exports mercenaries…

Our hero ends up getting into an unarmed-combat duel to the death with him. And the odds are not looking good.

Here is a little fellow from a race that tries to invade our dimension from another reality. They are not much larger than a football and not very bright, but they managed to enslave entire dimensions, and we are next on the list. They are called the Keelar…

Oh, our hero has his hands full leading an armada of allied ships to try to stop this menace, and yet it still ends up being more than a little funny. How do I even do that?

Here is a nice lady named Fawnya who looks a little like a Pterodactyl, and speaks like a Jewish mother. She just wants you to eat your soup!

You can see that I didn’t try too hard on that one. I even drew it on lined paper. Maybe later today I will play with that in Photoshop and see if I can clean it up a little.

I did one sketch for a character that I never got around to using. Maybe he will show up in book five as I write it. Who knows? Like I said, I don’t plan these things out.