In early 2020, I was in my first year of teaching middle school, a job I applied for and accepted out of absolute necessity, and I was miserable. There were times I felt so far out of my element I thought I must be hallucinating the midlife career change. My wife and I tried to unwind one night by going to a rock and blues show at Rhythm & Rye, a now-defunct venue in downtown Olympia. We’d pregamed, as the kids say, before the concert, so my mind was adrift. I was reminded of the drunken state Douglas Adams was in when he came up with the idea for my favorite novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That connection unlocked a new idea that exploded into my brain with cyclonic intensity: What if a touring rock band could somehow get launched into a universe full of alien races and space-opera intrigue?
I mentioned this whimsical book idea to my wife, who immediately declared it should be my next project. Now, my wife has a pretty good ear for a promising idea, so I let the notion ping around my head another couple of months. I was too busy teaching to do much about it or even to flesh out the hook, but I knew I wanted something reminiscent of the kinds of space opera novels I devoured as a teenager in the 1980s including Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, Gateway by Frederik Pohl, Startide Rising by David Brin, and every last word set in Larry Niven’s sprawling Known Universe. Those titles may not mean much in 2026, but they kept me sane during my very trying pre-college years and beyond. In an era when we were lucky to get two big-budget space operas a year on the big screen or network TV, those novels were my go-to form of popcorn entertainment.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and I found myself trapped at home with nought but streaming TV and my wonderful wife to keep me company. And lo and behold, it was awesome! — Stressful and frequently terrifying, of course, but also awesome, especially once it became clear I’d be finishing the school year teaching a few hours a day from my home office. Like most teachers, I spread out my nine months of pay over the full year, so with summer coming, I realized I could fulfill a lifelong dream: I could get paid to sit at home and write whatever fiction I wanted. And that brought my goofy “rock band in space” idea right back to the foreground of my imagination.
I’ve learned over the last few decades that writing fiction in the 21st century is an Autobahn to the poorhouse for pretty much every novelist, no matter how talented. I’ve also learned writing is hard work, because it’s the result of a whole lot of typing and deleting and typing again and re-editing and formatting and typing yet again. So I decided if I was serious about writing this book, I needed to be as un-serious as possible, which is to say I needed to write something I’d actually enjoy working on hour after hour, week after week until the darn thing was finished.
At some point I guess almost every middle-aged author writes a book set in the years of his youth, but I didn’t want to do that, exactly. For me at least, the ’70s and ’80s were stressful. I was trapped in a small Oklahoma town, forbidden by my fundamentalist denomination from going to college, and staying up late cleaning offices for rent and utility money. But I did love the entertainment! Star Trek and Star Wars movies at the cinema! The Next Generation on cable TV! Interlibrary loans! And once I started college, I fell deeply in love with epic rock and roll. My dorm roommate Tom, a good ol’ boy whose breath perpetually reeked of Skoal and insufficient dental care, introduced me to what, looking back, was probably the least likely band for a guy like him to adore, namely Pink Floyd. We’d listen the The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall on repeat; and the craziest part is, we weren’t even high. Pot was illegal all over the U.S. in that era, and neither Tom nor I ever indulged. We were just really, truly into the music. And who knows, maybe my love for Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen and Queen rubbed off on Tom a little, too.
Anyway, all of that cooked and gelled till I conceived of a touring band who was born in the ’80s but matured in a time when the human lifespan could be artificially extended for decades. Maybe such a band would still be playing arena-shaking prog rock near the end of the 21st century. If so, its members would’ve binged all the same entertainment I knew and loved. Now I was really starting to fall in love with the ROCK STARS idea, which coalesced into a kind of “Guardians of the Galaxy meets Ready Player One” interstellar fantasia. And because I’d been teaching middle school and all my favorite entertainment originated when I was a youngster myself, I planned to write a novel for precocious 13-year-olds like I was back in 1981, when I first read Adams’ then-two-year-old space lark.
Honest to Lucas, I really did think it’d be just one short novel. But the deeper I got into it, the more I realized it’d take me almost eighty thousand words, the length of a standard YA novel, to get my protagonists plausibly away from planet earth and into the thick of the multisocietal galaxy I’d been imagining. For once in my life I had too many ideas for four months of writing. When school returned in the fall, I returned to teaching in the classroom, both my and my students’ masks firmly in place, but I was able to finish Volume I after grading papers but before driving home. I put the novel in a drawer, electronically speaking, and started imagining a second and third volume to write in succeeding summers.
I quit my teaching job in the spring of 2021, a decision I’ve never regretted for even a single instant. If you’re a born teacher, God love you. I appreciate and honor what you do with all my heart, because I for one do not have it in me. My wife and I chose not to have kids for a lot of solid reasons, and staring down a room full of hormone-addled tweenagers has never been among my life’s dreams. But I did have at least a few students who, I think, had the makings of very fine writers, so I hope they get the opportunity one day to indulge themselves in the kind of imaginative brain play I’ve poured into ROCK STARS over the last six years.
In late summer 2025, after three wonderful years working from home for Washington state DSHS, I found myself transferred to a new role that pays a middle income but, thanks to its arduous commute, is slowly draining the very soul from my body. At some point I’m probably going to have to do something about that. But in the meantime, there’s a pretty huge dose of joy in my life, because danged if I’m not pleased with this ridiculous universe I’ve created from the pop culture stew swirling around the interior recesses of my skull. I suspect it’s not for everybody. I showed Volume I, Astrojuggernaut, to two beta readers, and one of them loved it while the other couldn’t quite see the point of it. And that’s OK. I don’t need to be a four-quadrant superstar. I just want other precocious 13-year-old Gen-Xers of any age to have a lovely time with it. So if you’ve ever blissed out to Clare Torry’s vocals on “The Great Gig in the Sky,” if you liked Farscape but thought it needed more Muppets, if you can identify a Drew Struzan or Michael Whelan painting on sight, if you’ve ever opened a jar of Pizza Quick Sauce and opened your own pizzeria, then this might be the space fantasy trilogy for you.
Leave a Reply