Normally, I only share a look at what’s on my desk with my subscribers, the Reading Rebels. They get my monthly blog posts by email each week and a letter once a month. Today, I’m sharing a never-before-shared bit of background because I’m excited about my newest project, a genre-bending space opera and medical drama mash-up. I hope you like it.
Alaria’s Story
Until she was sixteen, all Alaria had ever known was her town. A bubble town on a moon of the fourth planet of the Rhea-Cyra system. She didn’t understand the hardships and dangers she and her parents lived with every single day. She played with her dome-cousins and had school lessons over the net and did home chores and dome chores like everyone else. That all her dome-papas and mamas, and her dome-aunts and uncles and dome-cousins weren’t blood relatives didn’t matter. They were family. It was the only life she knew.
But one dome-papa had a special place in her heart. Jorta. Jorta sat her on his knee and told stories of his derring-do adventures as a dome-kid and his days as a titanium miner out in the asteroid belt. When she was twelve, her blood-mama and papa died in the D-SEC refinery explosion of 4421.
Jorta held her close to his heart and let her tears fall.
In her teenage years, she held him when progressive titanium-fibrotic pneumoconiosis shrank his lungs, his world, and eventually took his life.
Now, Alaria works for D-SEC as an advanced space-emergency medicine nurse practitioner on the emergency response and rescue spaceship, Mercy. And she has a mission…
Why a Space Opera and Medical Drama Mash-up?
If you had asked me last year that I’d be writing a space opera and medical drama mash-up, I’d have given you a big-old, sarcastic, “yeah, right.” In case you didn’t know, my mundane working life was as a registered nurse. For years, friends and mentors encouraged me to use my nursing background in my writing. I found it too difficult while working in the field. Why? I had another story inside that I had to write. Eventually, I retired and really focused on that story. Once I finished the Fellowship Dystopia, I didn’t know what I wanted to write.
I gave myself three months to find a new story. I picked up old, unfinished manuscripts and short stories I’d finished years ago. Not ready for that, I put them away again. Next, I tried writing an assortment of flash fiction pieces in different science fiction subgenres. Nothing tickled my writer’s heart. Then I tried writing a flash fiction space opera. Suddenly, a character who was a nurse practitioner appeared on the page. I wrote one thousand words and couldn’t stop. Other characters and worlds and all kinds of problems for the story crept into my imagination and onto the pages I wrote. And I wanted to know more, to write more.
How Do You Fit Space Opera and Medical Drama Together?
For me, space opera and medical dramas are two genres that fit naturally, but I understand that for some of you it may not seem so natural.
A space opera, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is a futuristic melodramatic fantasy involving space travelers and extraterrestrial beings. Its key elements are space travel that encompasses vast distances and multiple planets and/or civilizations. Romanticized heroes and villains engage in elaborate conflicts, often including galactic wars. The fates of civilizations and worlds often rest on the strengths and weaknesses of the heroes and villains.
The Star Wars movies and The Expanse, books and television series, are examples of space operas.
Medical dramas are stories where the main events happen in a hospital, clinic, or emergency medical setting. These stories center on medical professionals and their patients. The plots involve intense medical emergencies, ethical dilemmas, and life and death decisions. The fates of patients rest on the strengths and weaknesses of the medical personnel and their patients.
ER, Grey’s Anatomy, and House are famous long-running televised series in the medical drama genre.
Perhaps now you can see how these fit together. Take an emergency response team, put them on a spaceship filled with a variety of human and extraterrestrial medical personnel, and send them to worlds to deal with clashing cultures, ethical decisions, and life-and-death drama and…Viola!
Note
I was not an emergency medicine nurse, but I understand the language, so learning enough to write this kind of drama isn’t a huge stretch for me. The space opera portion, creating planetary systems and alien species–a whole new, STEEP learning curve!
A Work-in-Progress
If you follow me, or any other working writer, you have heard the term a lot. If not, a work-in-progress, shortened to WIP, is the term we use for a story that isn’t complete.
When I share snippets from my work-in-progress, it is an early version of the story. My writing process starts with exploring an idea and refining that idea as I go. That means I may or may not change an early version before publishing the story.
For example, I shared my early thoughts with the Reading Rebels, and said the galaxy I had created was called Prometheus. Yeah. That didn’t stick. I am going with the Rhea-Cyra binary star system…for now.
Remember that thousand-word space opera medical drama story I thought would be flash fiction? It grew longer. I shared an early version with my newsletter and got some great responses. I revised that story, which is now called “Orbital Shakedown,” and I sent it to some trusted writer friends for feedback. Once I get their feedback, I’ll revise the story again; then it’ll be available in final form for all my newsletter readers.
Oh, and the working title for the series is The Stars Don’t Bleed. I’m working on a prequel novella called, The Vector of Blame. At least it’s called that for now.
Are You Intrigued?
I hope you enjoyed my tiny prequel above. I’m having a blast developing this series of novellas and novels. If you’d like to get monthly updates on the development of this series with the occasional sneak peek at the work-in-progress. Join the Reading Rebels for updates during the long transition from WIP to a published space opera medical drama mash-up.
What do you think makes a genre mash-up work (or not work)? Would you have guessed that space opera and medical drama could blend so naturally before reading this?
Image Credits
All images are purchased from DepositPhotos or miblart.