You know that feeling when you’ve worked on something for a really long time, and you release it into the world? It’s wonderful and terrifying. Those are the feelings I get when I announce the release of my first book, The Tropic Of Never. It wasn’t a difficult birth, but the conception was less than auspicious: I woke up at 4 am one dark morning in October of 2012. I had high anxiety and I couldn’t get back to sleep. It had been a hard week emotionally, and I was sorting things out in my head. I had been pacing a lot in my apartment that week, and had even started growing a beard for the first time, just from the fact that I hadn’t taken very good care of myself during that emotional time. Yeah, I was totally Howard Hughes-ing out. Not peeing in jars, though. I promise.

I went to my computer (haha, yes my DESKTOP, jerks) and opened up WordPress to maybe write a blog post. My hands hovered over the keyboard, then started typing. To my surprise, what came out was “The night the Ceolsige crossed the Grey Meridian and into the Steppes, Edgar Locke had his first dream in over a year and a half.” And just like that, I knew: holy shit. This is my first novel. No matter what changed later, or what revisions happened, that first sentence always stayed the same.

What was I inspired by? Well, stop reading if you don’t want (minor) spoilers.

The city-sized vessel that Edgar Locke finds himself on in Part 1, the Ceolsige, was inspired directly by a small model of Noah’s Ark on display at the Museum Of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. Though the scale of the ship Locke explores is far larger by orders of magnitude, I always stare at the small wooden model, just inside the entrance of the museum, every time I go.

From my short description, “It’s about a dude on a boat, with animals”, you would think that this was influenced by Yann Martel’s Life Of Pi. In fact, I’ve never read it, and I deliberately sequestered myself from knowing anything about that book (and movie) while I was writing mine. The more I hear about Mr. Martel’s book, though, the more the similarities drop away, and it’s likely that “a boat” and “animals” are really the only thing the two have in common.

Around this time I rediscovered an album from the mid 2000’s that I had forgotten about, The Dissociative’s self-titled debut, and one of the tracks, Horror With Eyeballs, seemed particularly inspriring to a certain creature in my book:

What strikes most readers who helped give me feedback about early drafts is the parallells to the Book Of Genesis, and though it’s an interesting coincidence that Part 1 is being released the week that Darren Aronofsky’s Noah comes out, I’ll leave the comparisons to you, dear reader. Parts 2 and 3 are planned to come out before 2014’s end.

Thanks much for buying up a copy. I owe a debt of gratitude to so many, especially BLCKSMTH contributing editor Jennie Kay, the novel’s cover designer. Her recent move from Guatemala to Seattle allowed her to work closely with me on the project.

The Ceolsige is, at long last, leaving the dock. All aboard.