Writing on the Night Shift
Writing on the Night Shift
The origins of Komodo. Navigating and exploring systemic collapse in fiction.
In 2018, I wanted to know if a corporation could eat the world. I was working a minimum wage job on the sales floor of an expensive furniture store in downtown Santa Monica, commuting an hour each way with a license I’d only gotten a few months prior. I was 21, and I had a few months to go before I transferred to university from Santa Monica College as an incoming junior. I was playing a lot of XCOM 2 that summer, spending as much time on the character creator as the tactics. With my first paycheck, I had bought a Vive Pro, and many a warm night was spent showing off the novelty of VR to whoever was over at the house.
Creative fire was burning inside me, and even working 40-hour weeks I knew I had to write. So, I started to write. I began laying out the outline of a second novel, the first having been a pulpy adventure I completed in high school. I knew that I wanted to tell an epic story—one of a business going from the smallest seed to its most massive size. The histories of Microsoft, Apple, and IBM fascinated me. I also knew I wanted it to take place in the stars, and I wanted to use an alternate world that would let me strip away all the baggage of Earth. Lucas, after all, was very smart when he set Star Wars a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It would have been much too difficult to try and set his fairy tale of Star Wars in the future of our world.
Beyond that, I knew that I wanted to keep the worldbuilding as light as possible, for deliberate effect. The names would be names we’re familiar with. Technology would be referred to with simple nouns, with no need for a glossary like you find at the end of Dune. Both approaches have their place, but I knew that the light touch would better serve this story.
I called it PMC in my journal—Private Military Contractor. This was two years before the death of George Floyd, before riots broke out and the concept of abolishing American policing reached the mainstream. Still, there were latent doubts lingering among the progressives of my youth circles about the structure of our law enforcement services. I knew that this was the area I wanted to work in, creatively—the intersection of state and private enterprise, the intersection of enforcement and technology. I’d been following what Peter Thiel was doing with Citizen, his crime-tracking app, and I had a great sense within me that the nature of public safety was poised to change.
This was also a year when the long shadow of ISIS was stretching across the globe. 2016 and 2017 had seen a spate of brutal terror attacks, and, although they were losing, Daesh was still a force to be reckoned with in the Eastern Hemisphere. You could feel under Trump the tension that existed within the Western world, the idea that we were locked in some drastic struggle with ourselves and with the rest of humanity. It gave the sense at the time of a Jenga tower ready to fall.
I drafted my outline and found my hero. People ask me sometimes what the ‘comps’ are for this story, meaning the comparable works. As absurd as it sounds for a space opera, the most direct inspiration is probably There Will Be Blood, a masterful and minimalist epic of capital and family by Paul Thomas Anderson, adapted from Upton Sinclair. Daniel Plainview, the antihero of that story, captures the spirit of America in a way that is completely arresting. That spirit was one of the things I wanted to honor in my own work.
So, I started taking night shifts at the furniture store. Nobody goes in to buy a couch at 9 PM, but the mall that we were in required us to keep extended hours. I stood at the point of sale machine, which ran Windows XP, and in a Word document I wrote for hours and hours each day. If someone came in looking for a candle or a last-minute gift, I would stop and help them with a smile. Then it was right back to work.
My hero was a woman caught between cultures, caught between worlds, grappling with self-hatred and hatred of others. The idea of a split identity, a reflection of my own ethnic breadth, is something I expect to always be present in my fiction.
Her partner was the next character to emerge from the primordial pools of prewriting ideation. He was a Silicon Valley academic prodigy type, the kind I knew a lot of from my days growing up in the white-collar suburbs of Los Angeles. He would be an inverse mirror to her, a foil and catalyst for reflection.
Then there was the mentor, whom in my first outline I knew only as the operator. There was the love, and the other love, and all the other players in the grand ballet of the solar system. There wasn’t exactly a villain, in the classic sense, at first.
I read books on business, and biographies of famous founders. I met with a friend who was studying economics at Princeton and bought him a burger in exchange for his thoughts on macroeconomic collapse. Collapse, I found, was becoming a big theme of this manuscript. Then, as July turned to August, I began to write.
From all the spreadsheets and outlining, real characters of flesh and blood emerged on the page. There was dust and gunfire and spaceships and flowing capes and adventure and betrayal and pain. It was all coming to life with thrilling complexity and pace. I took seven months to write the manuscript, which I called Komodo. Then I took a few more months to edit it and receive feedback.
After that, I got to the business of querying, which is not my strong suit. In some ways, I was too honest about the book in my emails to agents, calling it an ‘epic tragedy’ and using terms that didn’t exactly scream marketability. In other ways, I think I failed to capture the scope of what exactly it was. It’s hard to compress 120,000 words of ideas into a few paragraphs of pitching. Komodo went out, and it got plenty of kind words, but ultimately everyone who was interested wanted to change some large part of what it was. I didn’t want to change it. It was the way it was for a reason. So, into the trunk of work it went, and it remained there for years until 2024, when I came to the realization that the publishing industry had, like the solar system of Komodo, endured a complete collapse.
This realization came when I started reading independently published literary fiction and discovered that the quality was far, far superior to what was being released contemporaneously by the large publishing houses. The major publishers, I was learning with some shock, were completely abandoning the zeitgeist avant-garde in favor of the uninspiring middle. There was, in fact, a community of bold and scandalous authors like the Romantics or Arts and Crafts writers of old. They were just all online, not at HMH and Random House.
So, there was no reason to wait for ‘trad pub’ and their approval. There was no reason not to just publish. With that in mind, I returned to my trunk of unpublished stories and discovered that Komodo was still by far the finest among them. It was the most ambitious, the most successful in execution, and the closest to my heart.
I gave it a thorough revision, honoring the spirit of 2018 while improving it with the lessons I had learned in the six years since. I painstakingly created a cover, wrote the blurb, and performed all the functions of a publisher along with the Askari team. When you are an independent writer, you are your own business, and it’s rarely a bad idea as a business to vertically integrate when you have the capability.
Komodo is up on Amazon to pre-order for Kindle today. When it releases on June 15th, 2024, a collectible hardcover edition will also be available for purchase. If you read it, please feel free to leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads. It’s clear the publishing industry has failed, but this does not mean that the spirit of adult literature needs to fail along with it. We’re here, we are producing the work that will come to define this decade, and we are not waiting for anyone’s approval.
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