Author’s Commentary on Deep Blue Sea

This was a ride, wasn’t it? A little slow in places, since we had to wait for things to happen, but hopefully it never got too slow.

I originally intended this to be the first part of a two-part arc, but (as they so often do) it overran my expectations. It’s just as well; I planned to intertwine them a lot more than I did and that would have caused some location difficulties.

In many ways, this is really the culmination of Lex’s journey. Serenity is there only because Lex and Bethany are his parents. Admittedly, he’s a catalyst, but while he sped up A’Atla’s return to the surface and added the ability to control it, they would still have risen a little later; A’Atla was already recovering. There’s a very good chance that the wrong people would have found Amani’s Vault if Serenity weren’t there, because no one else modern would have been able to open it - but Apollyon … well, he’s from that time period.

Serenity doesn’t remember the rise of A’Atla in the original timeline. The reason for that is simple: Earth didn’t advance even close to as quickly or stably in that timeline (Serenity has significantly helped Gaia out three times by my count), so A’Atla didn’t rise as soon; by the time A’Atla had enough mana, Earth was in bad shape and the previous Captain’s commands kept it underwater to try to preserve it. The Voice never announced its rise.

On another note, a lot of you noticed that I pulled from many, many different religions for names for the historical power players (call them gods if you want to). The idea here is twofold - first, it gives you an idea of “who” we’re talking about (though I warped some of the stories immensely). Second, it says something about history.

That something is supposed to be related to stories sometimes having a basis in reality but being massively warped; there’s a reason I used different names for the same “historical god” more than once. The ancients did that too, along with (over time) blending multiple gods together, splitting them apart, and having stories move from one to another. The fall of A’Atla is long before anything I can call reliable recorded history, which gave me lots of room to play around with things.

In terms of story structure, I’m giving this one a passing grade but not an excellent grade. It gets where we need to go and actually has a real conclusion but I think I need to tighten up some stuff in the middle; I’ll know that better when I go back over it. This is first draft material, still, after all.

Looking forward, I’ve tentatively titled the next arc Invasive Species. If you remember the last author’s note, you can probably guess the first topic I’m going to cover - the Solomon vases with Russ. I don’t expect that to be the only thread this time, but I guess you’ll just have to wait and see for the rest. I do have a plan that relates to the title, but I don’t want to say what it is at this point. What I can say is that I think we’ll be on Earth for most if not all of the arc.

Probably.

I should also mention the future of the series again. Since I didn’t fit the Solomon vases into Deep Blue Sea, we’re still looking at (probably) two arcs before I draw this series to a close and move on to the next one. I’ve gotten a little more plotting done on the next series, but at least half of it has been throwing an idea away, so it’s not all that much farther along than after the last arc. Since my attention is primarily on Serenity’s story, that is unlikely to change too much until I actually start on the next story.

See you in Invasive Species!

~Lillene