The Journey Through The Flux Catastrophe

The Flux Catastrophe has finally come to an end. Three whole novels and a prequel novella sprinkled on top, and now it’s time for me to move along. I suppose that the time for it was about a month ago when Corrupted Flux ACTUALLY came out, but hey, the month has been busy and it’s gotten away from me.

So I wanted to take a bit of time to talk about the journey I took alongside Ryza to write his story. It’s something I’ve shared bits and pieces of before, but this will be a process of sticking it all in one place.

It all started as a distraction. I was in my early twenties and attempting to edit the first version of what would become The Hytharo Redux into something I could throw at traditional publishers while trying to write a sequel to it as well, but none of it was quiet working. I was trying to mash in all these aspects of action and battle that were distracting from what Spiric’s story was meant to be, and I felt myself yearning to see what else I could do.

I’d grown up reading a lot of action books, the works of Matthew Reilly being a mainstay, and one aspect of the Droughtlands that I was always drawn back to were the Kretatics. I’m a sucker for a machine and the more bizarre a contraption it is, the more interested I am.

The walking fortress of Revance came long before Ryza did. It was an off-handed mention by a side character in this now long-buried Hytharo sequel, a piece of their backstory that took on a life of its own. A walking fortress! Amazing! Something like Howl’s Moving Castle but far larger!

I wanted to write all these amazing shoot-outs, these battles of machines and magic in this vast sand swept land, so I jumped right in.

SPOILERS FOR MOLTEN FLUX BELOW

It was originally titled The Forgefiends of Revance, with the Forgefiends being what eventually became the Locusts in later rewrites, and didn’t even involve the substance of molten flux, beyond a cursory mention at something that turned people into autominds, another word that didn’t exist back then.

The main thrust of the plot was that these autominds, then named slaves, were still alive, something that Ryza thought could still be saved, and that he was fighting to right the wrongs he’d inflicted under his father. The darkest moment for Ryza would’ve been the realisation that none of them could be saved, there were as good as dead, even if they were still alive.

The sharpest reason for the change was that I got some feedback that it just looked like I was doing white-saviour chattel slavery when I was getting feedback about the blurb. I’d had my own misgivings about some kind of missing depth to the story that I was coming around to, but this was the thing that finally made me realise it.

Before the big rewrite, the plot was missing SOMETHING. I wasn’t quite sure what, but in retrospect it was clear.

There was no cyclical plot link that would connect Origin, who at the time talked out loud and not in haiku, the walking fortress of Revance, and the industry of autominds. They were three, unrelated things that happened around Ryza, and I hadn’t yet seen the full extent of the corpse-fuelled military-industrial complex that I was building up here.

The conception of molten flux was what saved it all, and if you’ve read the book, you can imagine just how much would be missing without the focus on it. If you haven’t read the book, you should probably stop reading, because there’s big spoilers ahead!

Anyway, it was only in 2022 or so that I started tackling some of the rewrites to institute molten flux into the story and make it the central concept. I was on the tail end of my time in tech-sales and pretty sick of the whole thing, had been recently diagnosed with ADHD, and had also cracked the code of what The Hytharo Redux was meant to be, after many, MANY attempts.

Other chunks that got removed was the big battle for Revance after Ryza retrieved Origin from the ruins of Twin Rings, which I’ve posted and talked about in another blog post on here. There was a few different versions of Kyrea that I went through. The first was a simple crossroads trade town on flat land, where autominds were bought and sold. The next was closer to the final results, nestled inside a series of massive concrete trenches left by those-of-glass. The final iterations with the tunnels was a change I made very late in the story, and was the heaviest section of rewrites.

All that served to further expand on Ferrick’s character, and there were also additions of chapters at the start to flesh out the rest of Ryza’s squad, somewhere after his first feats in Revance’s rifle range.

Thinking on it, the only chunks that remain largely unchanged was the opening chapter with Ryza’s escape from the smelters, the scene in the rifle range, the fight in the scrapyard with Holm, and the celebration with the Locusts and subsequent fight with Ferrick beneath Twin Rings.

Origin was the one who went through the most significant changes. His first iteration, once he could talk, was actually a little bit of a wise-ass, but I’m glad I changed him to the more silent, mysterious figure that he is. Despite how little he actually appears in the subsequent books, it’s made him integral to the story.

SPOILERS FOR RISING FLUX BELOW

Rising Flux was a much more straightforward book to write. I smashed it out in about eight days in November of 2022, and it was a test I’d set myself to see if I could really give myself a go with a self-publishing career. Could I write fast enough? I thought so, but this success also gave me delusions of somehow writing and releasing four books a year, along with novellas!

You can only imagine how bad that would’ve been!

Anyway, Rising Flux was the first story I feel like I started fresh with, one that didn’t have nearly a decade of attempts behind it. Rettic’s character felt natural to summon up, one that was curious yet suspicious, though not able to overpower the former with the latter to save himself.

Archarus’ character also felt new. In the writing of Molten Flux, I’d always worried he’d just feel like a copy of the shadow dancer that appears in The Hytharo Redux, but this novella actually gave him a different core vision which I then carried through to Molten Flux’s final rewrites.

I do sometimes wish that I could’ve explored the other three side characters some more, or even do a bit more world building, but I wanted this to be an extremely fast read, one that hurled you deeper and deeper under the Droughtlands with every chapter.

It was the first book I released, a test of the water so I could see what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong. I hadn’t networked enough, built enough hype, gotten enough reviewers, all that nonsense, but most of all, I’d tried to edit and proofread it entirely on my own, which I’ve now thankfully learned is a job best left for someone else.

The other vision was to write and release a prequel continuing Rettic’s story as he further discovers the secrets of molten flux in his time as a way to hype up subsequent books in The Flux Catastrophe, but the writing schedule between The First Hytharo series, this, and actually trying to sell the books proved too demanding for it.

I’d initially planned to write them retrospectively, but having now completed the series, I don’t feel like I can continue to reveal more of this world. To do so would tread on Ryza’s legacy, and I wouldn’t disrespect him like that.

SPOILERS FOR BLAZING FLUX BELOW

While Rising Flux was the first thing I wrote now I was calling myself an author, Blazing Flux was the first full-length novel, and the fastest one I’d written to date.

As you read above, molten flux as a substance wasn’t even a concept until late rewrites of the first book, so the entire concept of what the final product became wasn’t even possible.

One version of Molten Flux’s original ending had Ryza lying stricken in the wreckage of a fallen Revance, with another shadow dancer and a rebuilt, human-sized Origin debating just what to do with him. It would’ve resulted in a sequel where Ryza was kidnapped by Origin and taken high into the mountains by Origin, while Holm searches for him. I can’t quite remember where it was going to go after that, but the phrase “mechanical garden” still lingers in my mind.

It was only after watching both the HBO Chernobyl miniseries and All Quiet On The Western Front that I put two and two together. The scene in the former where the miners must tunnel beneath the derelict nuclear reactor to build a barrier to stop the radioactive lava from getting into the groundwater is an obvious parallel to draw. For the latter, it was when they discovered an entire force of young soldiers dead in a warehouse, because they’d taken their gasmasks off before the deadly chemical weapons of World War One had dissipated.

These two things were what gave me the idea to further evolve the concept of the flux as it amassed in greater and greater quantities. The aesthetic of the vent masks was integral, as was this futile, unending drudgery of dealing with this wreckage.

Anyway, Blazing Flux was a fast write, and one that didn’t suffer nearly as many changes as the books that’d come before it. Other than Holm’s sudden change of course halfway through it, the plot largely stuck to the plan I had in my mind when I’d typed the first letters.

It was written in a strange time in my life. I had been writing full-time for about six months at that point, and my self-worth was in the toilet. I was barely talking to my friends, going out, or doing much of anything other than writing, really. I was still struggling with motivation outside of my own hyper-fixations.

I was just anxious, bitter, distant and full of suspicion-laden angst, something that reflected deeply in Ryza’s character in this book. It’s clear in the opening couple of chapters that Ryza has taken a leap forward in his self-actualisation, he’s taken command of his life, he’s now the one calling the shots! But it all ends up being so much harder than it looks, and he’s not having nearly the success he thought he would be. He feels abandoned and lost, yet he sticks to this absurd mission to clean up the mess he thinks he’s responsible for because to surrender to that, means he has nothing else, he IS nothing else.

He desperately grasps for control where he can find it, though this only drives people away. Even his relationship with Holm starts to shatter as he attempts to pre-empt any possible point of discomfort he might cause her, so he may scrub this endless stream of people-pleasing guilt from his mind.

It’s the writing of this book where the themes of control, of wants and needs, really came to the fore. I felt I was giving everything so much more meaning, that I was really hitting my stride, right up until I hit a road-block at the halfway point.

Ryza had gone down into the factory of factories that Cardan had left behind, and then I just couldn’t find a reason for the book to continue. All the tension, all the conflict that’d been brewing, just seemed meaningless in the face of this existential threat they now faced. It just wasn’t personal any more, and it took me about two or three months before I came back to it and let Holm take the wheel.

I wasn’t one to believe that the writing writes the writer until that moment, but Holm’s unmasking was something entirely out of my control. This type of scene was originally charted for the finale under Iroka, where Holm would sacrifice herself in an attempt to overcome and re-kill Maligar from within the flux.

But suddenly she was just sick of it. Sick of me. Sick of being controlled by me. She fought back and I was back to thundering along with it, hammering in several thousands of words a day over the next month until Ryza’s journey was complete. The entire sequence between the moment that Ryza goes off alone down the tunnel under Iroka to the very end of the story was written in one or two sittings.

The final moment of control that this book took from me came with the last line. After Ryza’s various conversations of resolution with the other characters, he was meant to actually see a flux-manifested vision of Holm so that I could end the book with the same line that I’d ended the first, but Vorric’s final line was just too perfect.

“I need you.”

It was too perfect a twist on a book that had been all about wants and needs, the manipulation and manifestations of them. I simply couldn’t add another word after that. A similar thing would go on to happen in The Hytharo Origin. (If you know you know!)

SPOILERS FOR CORRUPTED FLUX BELOW

Corrupted Flux was another piece of new ground to break. An ending. It’s a very different experience because suddenly I can’t introduce new plotlines, red herrings or new offers of story. It HAS to end. I always knew how it would, but the start was a difficult thing to pin down.

The opening scenes were more action-packed than I’d originally envisioned because my editor had given me some great feedback that Ryza’s openings in the depths of the action were the strongest introductions. Originally he was meant to be on the verge of a breakdown in the middle of Breggesa as he tried to explain what had happened to the rest of the Scythes.

Even the injection of his father into the story, especially this early, was something that felt like a risky move for Ryza’s character. Putting a face to this shadowy demon in his past risked taking away from the mystery of Ryza’s own upbringing, but I feel I’ve done it justice. Aphtus-Hast is every part the monster that Ryza believes him to be.

The other risk was the continuation of Vorric’s character. If you’re reading this deep, then you know of my “read in any order” philosophy, so I had to toe a very fine line between not revealing too much about his character and his motives, but also providing a clear resolution to his character arc in this series.

When it came to Ruka and Ditric, I wanted their stories to continue on where they appear in The First Hytharo, so I purposely left their story arcs a bit open ended.

Overall, the book was slightly painful to write. Hurling myself closer and closer to this interminable, final end had me experiencing the same fate as the shadow dancers I created, I felt the walls closing in of having to actually plan the damn thing out and not just write whatever I happened to feel was write. Against the advice given to Ryza, I COULDN’T follow my instincts.

The act of bringing this all together, of making it make sense, meant that I needed to finally resolve all the little logic puzzles and traps I’d laid for myself in the conflict between molten flux and pure resonance. The finale reflects this, and was something I had to be very careful with editing. One wrong word and the whole thing falls apart.

But the overall philosophy that got me through was to “play the hits.” I think that will be my continuing advice to anyone who has to write their own end to a series. Now was the time to capitalise on all the set up and the big moments that I’d established with the previous books.

You can see this in the return to the scrapyard, the fight at the accelerator, and the revival of Revance as Ryza prepares himself to finally face Holm. Even the war serpent, the terrifying machine that lay dormant in the ruins of Twin Rings, finally got its due.

Now as I look to the future, I wonder what it will feel like to say goodbye to Spiric when the time comes. As with Ryza, I know his end, but the journey there is still a mystery to be unravelled.