As we approach the launch of my debut novel, I’d like to share a bit about how we got here in the first place. The road to publication has been long and winding, perhaps more so than many future readers might expect. There were a lot of hurdles to clear along the way—draft edits, full rewrites, agent querying, contest submissions—so when I look back over the journey in its entirety, I can see that the distance travelled is something of a story in itself.

I was going through some of my old notes from the earliest phases of the novel’s conceptualization just the other day, which gave me the idea to write about this. All writers have their own unique creative processes; some plot methodically, spending countless hours crafting chapter summaries, character profiles, and establishing lore before ever sitting down to write their first draft. Others do something akin to ‘vibe-coding’ and just let the ideas flow, from mind to page, more or less without interruption. Then they go back over their work, again and again, honing the raw material until the final, polished story emerges.

In my case, I keep a sort of digital journal in my phone to jot down ideas as they come to me (once upon a time, it was a real physical journal). You never know when inspiration will strike! Gradually, as the notes accumulate, a concept for a full story begins to solidify. At some indeterminate point—I’m not exactly one of the super-methodical creative types—I judge that enough’s enough and it’s time just to write the darn thing. I don’t usually have a full story plotted out, or even ideas of what the different chapters will contain. In my experience, you don’t necessarily need that level of meticulous planning beforehand to bring a novel into existence. What you do need is an intriguing premise, a driving question to animate the story (What would happen if…?), maybe a couple of ‘thematic resonances’ ie. ideas which, though as-yet unshaped, point the story in a certain direction by imagining some of the hows and whys and emotional beats that are meant to be hit, and a handful of interesting characters to play off of one another. These ingredients probably work better for creating science fiction stories than they do other genres—you probably do need to do a lot more research if you’re going to create, say, a historical fiction novel—but as sci-fi/fantasy is my wheelhouse, I can attest that this system (insofar as I can call it a ‘system’) works fairly well. I’ve written 3.5 novels* to date, and while the earliest ones are certainly not of the same level of quality as Pneumanauts, they’ve all more or less come to fruition through this process. Conceptualization, iteration and reiteration—persistence, in a word. That’s the name of the game, so far as I’m concerned.

It took a lot of persistence to get Pneumanauts to where it is today. Without further ado, let’s dive in!

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Artwork by Ed Valigursky for the 1972 edition of The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein.

The foundation

The general context for my creative process having been established, I can tell you that the earliest ideas for the project which would eventually become Pneumanauts came to me sometime in 2018. I can’t say precisely when or why—I generally have a poor memory, perhaps on account of my ADHD—but I do recall that this story emerged from my desire to create something very different than what I’d made before. All of the previous novels I’d written at this point in my life were varying shades of sci-fi/fantasy, as this has always been my preferred genre to both read and write. My tastes hadn’t changed, but I had. 2018 was around the time that I was beginning the serious work of transitioning into that longest of personal eras, that of the full-fledged adult; the version of oneself who’s now seen and done enough in life to have a definitive sense of ‘who one is’, and also, I suppose, ‘who one is not’. It’s at this stage that some major decisions must be made. Possibilities must be collapsed into actualities. The myriad of options open to youth must be narrowed, and pathways chosen. In my case, I’d recently become engaged and was looking at the prospect of my life becoming narrower, in a sense—not a bad thing at all, I should make clear. I mean to say, the future—the narrative trajectory of my life—was beginning to look a very specific way. It was going to involve the person I was marrying, and not as some incidental side character. Having a family of our own was on the horizon, as was where we would settle, what our careers would be, who would be part of our lives for the long term—friends, parents, colleagues, and indeed, children. We were both twenty-somethings working abroad, hitherto experiencing life on our own terms, learning and growing as individuals, beholden to none but ourselves. And that was great! Those are important developmental stages for anybody to go through, made all the more challenging (and rewarding) by doing it in a foreign country and culture.

I suppose that, as I looked to the future and saw the rest of my life taking shape, it prompted me to also look back on where I’d been, and where I’d come from. My past life in Canada was already receded into the rear-view mirror, having left home to work overseas a year earlier, but it was becoming clearer than ever that I would never be returning. Not like, never never—I mean, never to live my life as it had once been. Canada was my home—it was where I’d grown up, the place that has formed and nurtured me—but it would not be my home again. It was very much a place in my past. My spouse was not Canadian, and it was looking like if we were to settle down together anywhere other than where we currently were living and working, it would likely be her own home country. That was an adventure worth embarking on, for sure, but it did instil in me a certain nostalgia for the world I was leaving, and indeed had already left well behind.

So I started getting ideas about a new story I might tell—a story about where I’d come from. A story that might help me to make sense of myself, of how I’d become the person I was. The sunset of my youth was upon me, I recognized. Not to sound too fatalistic, because we are, of course, always changing and growing and adapting to our life circumstances, no matter how old we are, but I do feel that I was nevertheless crossing a threshold. Once on the other side, my life would become about a lot more than just me, in the way that an adult who’s made compromises, closed doors and shouldered burdens must contend with daily.

I imagine that sounds like I was doing a lot of navel-gazing at the time. Indeed, the creative work which served as an initial spark for Pneumanauts could easily be described as such. I’d decided that I’d eschew my usual propensity for the fantastical and wondrous and try to tell a more ‘grounded’ story. Something akin to a memoir, even, funny as it is to think of a twenty-something, barely a quarter of the way through their lifespan, writing a memoir. I’d been reading another memoir—Martin Luther King Jr.’s, if I’m not misremembering—and had also begun consuming a lot more nonfiction than I had in the past. News and political analysis, for the main part, and not necessarily for the better. I don’t mean this to say that I was overly self-serious and believing that I had some grand, important lessons to impart to the world. No, I was quite aware that my experiences in life thus far were fairly ordinary, none too dramatic, and not exactly the riveting sort of stuff that might make books fly off shelves. What I wanted was to write for myself, first and foremost (I think that’s generally decent advice for writers, though it must be counterbalanced by the awareness that such an approach will only take one so far) and do some purposeful introspection. I knew I was a skilled writer, with a genuine grasp of craft and appreciation of quality—should it not be possible to turn my tools upon my own story, rather like a painter creating a self-portrait?

I suppose, also, that I was experimenting in writing something that might be considered ‘literary’. Science fiction and fantasy are not generally regarded by the wider populace as genres of literary value—a fact which I have my opinions about, but I won’t get into here. I set to work, and cranked out the first few chapters of a project which was focussed squarely on those formative experiences which I felt had shaped me. My university years, I thought, seemed the best place to begin kicking over the rocks of my selfhood and examine the wriggly things hiding in the crevices. I’d write about the tension I’d felt being a Christian person, thoroughly churched, with a pastor for a father—and a rather unique background as being, at least for a period of my childhood, part of a religious sect oftentimes classed as a cult—and being set loose in the wild, wild world of secular, liberal tertiary education. This was, after all, an incredibly important and transformative period of my life. I believe I underwent something of a course correction during those years, in fact; I might easily have turned away from the opportunities—opportunities which compelled me to change, embrace, explore—and stuck with what I knew, what I was comfortable with, if I hadn’t met certain people and made certain choices while away at school.

So far, so good. But then I got several thousand words into the first draft and realized I wasn’t having any fun. It’s not that what I’d written was poor, but it was certainly dry (my most common complaint when reading so-called ‘literary’ works) and ultimately uninspired. The fact that it was semi-autobiographical, funnily enough, wasn’t holding my interest. I’m an interesting person, sure, but I’m not more interesting than, say, space pirates or ancient alien civilizations or techno-wizards fighting transdimensional demons on dragonback or whatnot. I was a sci-fi/fantasy writer at heart! Where was the high strangeness, the sheer wonder that I so loved? Why would I write about boring old life on Earth when I could be writing about fanciful, exciting, awe-striking life on other planets, other worlds?

Suffice it to say, the project wasn’t working, but the core idea had potential. A story about a kid going to university and having his (relatively immature) faith challenged—there was something there. Maybe not the setting itself, but the idea of dealing with the inner tension of believing something, or wanting to believe something, and struggling to hold to it. That was a story I’d been living my whole life. That’s where the idea for the working title had come from: ‘Trench Foot’, as in, the festering rot that sets in when one is trapped in the trenches between two opposing sides, battle-lines drawn and intractable, unable to progress or retreat. The common framing of the religious vs. secular worlds as fundamentally at war with one another is one that I have issues with, but having grown up thoroughly immersed in one of these worlds, and also acutely aware of how different the other was—and struggling to navigate the gap between them—it seemed to appropriately dramatize the conflict I was looking to explore.

At no stage was I thinking that I’d be writing Christian fiction or specifically for religious audiences. Rather, I felt that the experience of having faith and working out what that means in the world—a world which can often feel indifferent or even hostile to such beliefs—while not universal, followed the same foundational arc that all good stories do: a person facing obstacles both external and internal, moving forward to achieve self-actualization. Handled deftly, such a story could be made intelligible to those who’d never experienced it. I thought I might be able to represent this sort of story as part of the human mosaic—not a sermon, not a testimony, but a spiritual journey.

The influences

So, the core idea has taken root, but I needed to rethink what overall shape the story would take. Looking back, I can identify three distinct external influences that were all working away in the background of my mind, subtly influencing me and, eventually, coalescing into the breakthrough that I needed.

The first was a conversation that I’d had with my father years prior, also from the time that I was a university student. We were travelling back from school for Christmas break and had stopped along the highway at a roadside Tim Horton’s (a prominent Canadian coffee and donut chain) for a quick bite. I’ve written about what happened that day on this publication previously, so I won’t repeat too much here; I’ll simply state that we talked about what a Christian person’s proper response to the discovery of aliens ought to be. That might seem an odd discussion to have with one’s pastor-father, but I’m quite lucky to be part of a family that, while maintaining certain religious convictions, remains open-minded and theologically curious. My dad took my question seriously and we talked about what happens when a believer is confronted with something straight out of science fiction—something which, our best scientific understanding of the universe would tell us, is more than an abstract absurdity, but a likely-as-not eventuality.

That conversation planted a seed which would germinate many years later, not only in the formation of Pneumanauts, but in this entire publication! The permission—the encouragement, even—I received as a young person to critically examine the ideas I’d been taught all my life has set me on an explorative journey which has been incredibly rewarding and meaningful. Without it, it’s easy to imagine I might have fallen into a stunted sort of pseudo-faith, spiritually hindered and hemmed in on all sides by dogma and fundamentalist ideology. If you read the novel, or indeed, any of the posts on this little site, I think you’ll find that my writing reflects the conviction that we shouldn’t be afraid of asking difficult questions about what we believe and why. Both Pneumanauts and The Pneumanaut are committed to doing just that, as well as recognizing that there may not be any answers—at least, not on this side of the Great Beyond. The key is in the searching, and in the meantime, learning to be comfortable with ambiguity (and the disagreement of others).

The second direct influence that helped transform what started out a personal memoir into an offbeat science fiction novel is Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. This book, more than any other, helped inspire me to see the concept of Pneumanauts as viable. I read Parable through sometime in 2019 after receiving a copy as a gift from a friend—a fellow sci-fi enthusiast, who particularly enjoyed highlighting the works of lesser-known authors, oftentimes from marginalized communities. I’d actually encountered this novel earlier in life—in university, again, as part of a science fiction literature course I was taking—but had failed to read it through or fully engage with it. It had seemed just a bit too mundane, at the time. ‘Mundane’ was even the name that the professor had given to the sub-genre it belonged to, as, though it does employ some science fiction elements—it takes place in a dystopian future, there is a strange novum (new thing) which has transformed the way society functions—these elements are relegated to the background of the story, appearing only intermittently or vaguely alluded to. The story eschews the usual preoccupation with dense world-building or common science-fictional narrative tropes, like space exploration or combating alien intelligences, to focus on characters and their personal dramas, which are largely of the ordinary kind. Family issues, financial troubles, relationship difficulties. Racism, also, in this case. The world that Butler constructs is readily recognizable, setting it apart from what we usually think of when we consider what makes science fiction, science fiction.

I bounced off of Parable the first time perhaps because I hadn’t read widely enough to properly situate it in its literary context. But, as I reread it, I found myself engrossed. The religious symbolism, first and foremost, captured my interest. I hadn’t realized that it was possible to employ such overtly Christian themes and topics in science fiction.** Indeed, the main character’s journey is specifically one of spiritual discovery. What was a story about a pilgrimage doing in the science fiction category? And why were the science fiction elements—the invented, speculative novum which distinguished this constructed world from our own—pushed so far into the background, so much so that the characters hardly encounter any of them? I saw that Butler had charted a course I might like to follow: she’d placed human characters, their personal and relational issues at the front and center, and simply let them interact. The science fiction world they inhabited was just ‘the world’; they needn’t be overly preoccupied with it any more than we are with ours. Don’t most of us simply get on with life, our daily routines, our intimate relationships, rather than getting caught up in political conspiracies or rescue missions or assassination plots or journeys to strange and isolated places? Those things might happen, but they tend to happen out there, in the background of our own humble little lives.

Pneumanauts, then, could focus on its characters. The science fiction elements—because at this point, I knew I wanted something to differentiate the world I was creating from our own—could be framed as almost incidental to the story enfolding in the lives of these human beings I’d imagined. I’d started out wanting to write something more grounded, more psychological, and reading Butler’s work was like receiving permission to do so. Religion, as well—the exploration and critique of it—was fair game. The pieces were starting to come together: a story about young people struggling with their religious beliefs, set against a backdrop of a world like our own, but distinct in some critical way. Maybe aliens could be the differentiating factor—the novum? What would these young people do if they found that aliens were real, just as I’d asked my dad that one day at Tim Horton’s?

The final source of my inspiration was perhaps the most unusual. I love to read, but I also love video games, I love art, and I love music. I’ve found all of these things to be rich seams of creative inspiration throughout my life. In this instance, circa 2018-19 I’d become nigh obsessed with a particular sub-genre of heavy rock, variably referred to as ‘stoner’, ‘doom’, or ‘heavy psych’. I’ll use the term stoner-doom from here on out, though the dualistic name belies a veritable bevy of micro-genres and styles all captured under a wide umbrella.

Stoner-doom can be understood as Black Sabbath worship, in the most basic terms. Black Sabbath, widely and appropriately credited for being the progenitors of heavy metal, are one of the most consequential bands ever, I’d argue. Most people recognize their cultural contribution in pioneering brutal guitar riffs, driving drumbeats and occultic imagery which, when bound together, more or less make up the fundamental character of what heavy music is recognized as worldwide. What is less often immediately associated with Sabbath, though no less integral to their identity, is their fondness for getting high. Stoner-doom takes up a special fascination with drug culture and revels in the spacey, tripped-out weirdness that ensues when one gives themself over to the influence of marijuana, shrooms, and the like. The slow-moving, sludgy aspects of Sabbath’s sound (featured especially on their debut record) are indicagtive of this. If you’re familiar with the band’s catalogue at all, think of the three songs ‘Sweet Leaf’, the self-titled ‘Black Sabbath’ and ‘Planet Caravan’ as evincing the spiritual essence of the genre.

Disclaimer time: I should probably pause to mention that I am a straight-edge kind of guy (cue the reader’s skeptical eye-rolling) and have never done any kind of drug in my life. That’s partially because of my sheltered upbringing, but also because of my own choices and convictions. So, when I say that I’ve an ‘obsession’ with the stoner-doom indie music scene, it’s not because I myself am some kind of enthusiast for psychedelics themselves.

I can’t quite put my finger on why this particular musical style scratches just the right itch for me. Earlier in my life, I had quite eclectic tastes, but ever since diving headfirst into the heavy stoner-doom underground, I’ve hardly ever come up for air. It’s like there are these submerged caverns of sonic sublimity, and no matter how far I probe, there’s always more to discover. I can’t cast my net wider because there’s always further to go deeper, if you catch my drift. It’s partially to do with the deliciousness of a slick, grimy riff and the guttural bellowing vocals; it’s partially to do with the plodding, mammoth-stomp rhythms and the sheer weightiness of the overall sonic experience. But it’s also got a lot to do with the unique iconography employed by this particular scene. Stoner-doom has a very specific visual style that complements the aural. Bands will often feature artwork on their album covers and merchandise that is heavily inspired by the 1960s and 70s eras, when rock was king and dope-smoking was ubiquitous. There’s also inspiration drawn from classic science fiction and weird fiction, as you can see in the particular artwork I chose to use for this post (the dead astronaut is something of a recurring motif across the genre). There’s occultic stuff, as is often the case with heavy music, but it’s rendered in a curious way—sometimes blended with outright Christian symbolism, sometimes with feverish, dreamlike psychedelica. And other times it’s just kind of stupid, nerdy, testosterone-fuelled guy stuff: muscle cars with oversized engines, boogie vans flying through space, fantasy heroines wielding battle-axes, monsters ripped from the pages of comic books and pulp magazines. Put together, it becomes a very strange brew indeed, setting it apart as its own special branch of the rock n’ roll family tree.***

I’ve been listening to stoner-doom for years now, and it’s a genre of music I find creatively stimulating in all sorts of ways. I suppose it’s to do with the fact that I suffer from a very peculiar sort of anemoia—a sense of nostalgia for an era I’ve never myself experienced. That era is the heady days of the late 60s and 70s, when all the things that make stoner-doom what it is—vans, booze, drugs, sci-fi, monsters and magic—were at the forefront of the cultural milieu. I’m not advocating that we go back to those times, but I feel there’s just something cool about them. Maybe that’s down to my dad’s influence acting on me again, since he grew up during that period and lived many of those now-archetypal experiences firsthand. He’d lived in Saskatchewan—part of the Canadian prairies, often regarded as a bleak a place as any for a young person to grow up—and had been driving around in vans and listening to Sabbath and their ilk when they were contemporary. I’d never been out West (apart from one trip to Alberta and BC to see the Rockies, which did also feature in my conceptualization of the novel), but I got a flavor of what life was like from an image he kept in his office of a farm building and a silo set against a multi-toned sunset, surrounded by flat fields. It was an altogether stark and harsh beauty, to my mind.

Turning this over in my head one day, I realized that I had an ideal setting for my story. I’d briefly considered setting the novel in the States—because that’s where anybody looking to gain an audience tends to set their stories—but there was something about the prairies which I felt drawn to. I was embarking on this creative journey to better understand myself and where I’d come from, after all. That meant understanding my parents, and where they’d come from; their experience, in particular their experience in the church we’d been part of when I was younger, had shaped so much of our lives. What I began to see was that to tell my stories, I’d have to tell theirs as well. The same went for my grandparents. The notion of looking backward in time, rather than forward, took root.

1976 ended up being the year I finally settled on; a year when the likes of Sabbath, Floyd, Zeppelin and Deep Purple could be heard on the radio or playing loudly from car stereos as they rumbled down the highway. It was also, of course, a time marked by its prevalent drug culture, but not the idealistic free-lovin’ sort of the 60s. By the late 70s, the hippie dream for a better world had faded and given rise to a more cynical age, characterised by a jaded nihilism and general malaise. That kind of era, it seemed to me, was what the stoner-doom scene was trying to spiritually channel and evoke in its listeners, ever since its inception in the late 90s with acts like Kyuss, Clutch, Fu Manchu, Sleep and Electric Wizard. An era marked by a pervading sense of doom, even if no one could quite put their finger on how or when it would all fall apart. It seemed also that we were living through a similar era currently.

Now I had all the ingredients I needed: a mundane sci-fi story exploring religious themes, focusing on relational struggles of teenagers living in the desolate landscape of the Canadian prairie in the 1970s, employing the iconography of the stoner-doom genre for thematic resonance. It would be a story oddly displaced in time and theme—both serious and scornful of the sacred, wonder-struck and world-weary, regressive and progressive (and hopefully not transgressive), sitting uneasily in the spaces between all of them. This, I thought, was a story only I could tell. A story made authentic by my unique vantage point and life experience. It would be weird, but weird could be good—or, at the very least, not boring. A story that might have a shot at going the full way and being published someday, somehow, someway.

The campaign

Spoiler alert: it did! But it was not exactly a straightforward path to finally getting there. The novel went through several phases of pitching, where I took different tacks to try and get it off my my hard drive and out there into the wider world, in some capacity. I’ve taken to calling this section of the post a ‘campaign’ because it required sustained, intentional effort to get this novel over the line, and there was never any guarantee that it would make it. I’m eminently grateful to the people at Eclogue Press for seeing the potential in the story and pouring their time and resources behind it to help it succeed.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves—how did this story go from a concept, to a finished manuscript, to the stage we’re at today, counting down to launch? Well, there was the drafting and editing to get through, first. Pneumanauts went through three drafts before I felt it ready to take on the world. The name, also, was something that needed to be decided on. A good novel needs something snappy, something distinct yet memorable. The working title throughout its early life was ‘Motorprophets’. I never particularly loved the name, but it captured what I was aiming for: religious connotation juxtaposed with something harsh, guttural, a touch irreverent. It sounded like it could be a band name, which I liked, and also acted as a descriptor of the novel’s main characters: a group of misfit, disillusioned teenagers on the hunt for meaning and purpose in a world that didn’t make sense, a world which seemed ambivalent to their very existence.

The idea for the name ‘Pneumanauts’ was essentially an improved version of Motorprophets. I noticed that many of the stoner-doom bands I liked had various tracks with the suffix -naut included, usually a word of their own invention. ‘Supernaut’ by Black Sabbath here is perhaps the best example, and indeed, I found a way to feature the song in the novel itself as a special homage. The idea of the -naut was yet another totem existing within the collective consciousness of the scene’s members. What it signified could vary from the profound to the ridiculous. In my case, my eureka moment was when I combined -naut with the Greek word ‘pneuma’. I knew straightaway that this was the perfect title to capture the spirit of the book.

Once again, I’ve written about the meaning of the word pneumanaut on this publication before (which make sense, as I named the publication itself The Pneumanaut!) so I won’t repeat too much here.**** ‘Pneuma’ can be taken to mean the spirit or soul, and a -naut is a sailor, or one who explores. Spirit-explorers seemed to be the perfect way to express what the characters of my novel were all about. They were each of them pneumanauts, which isn’t to say that they were in any way similar in their beliefs or convictions; rather, what they shared was a profound yearning for more—to know more, to understand more, to get closer to the answer to life’s big questions. They were each spiritual seekers, and they were all on journeys taking them to very different places. It was an exercise in branding, in part, but it was also much more. I’m proud to be a pneumanaut myself, and to belong to a family of fellow pneumanauts!

With the title locked down and the manuscript reviewed and polished, the next big leap was to take it to market. This was a hurdle I’d tried to clear in the past with previous novels I’d written, yet never succeeded. I’d taken courses on approaching agents, attended writers conferences, read lots of material giving advice on how to write query letters. I’d kept a list of publishing contests available to amateur authors for many years, and had even entered a few of them. I got to work on the query letter, researched some agents whom I felt might be interested in representing me, and sent them off.

I heard nothing back. I don’t think I’ve ever received any sort of reply from any literary agent at any stage, ever. Now, I’m not going to use this as an opportunity to bash the traditional publishing industry—Lord knows, my interests are as niche as they come, and I can hardly attest to the mass market appeal of my work. Still, it seemed the place to start looking. I didn’t take it too hard when those query letters went unanswered, as I believe I’d calibrated my expectations just right. The trad-pub world simply was/is not looking for the sorts of stories I’m looking to tell, or it seems, from someone like me to tell them—though there were glimmers that maybe, just maybe, there might be some passing interest if the story in question was off-the-wall enough to ruffle a few religiously-conservative feathers. The novel Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar hit shelves during this period, and I took it as a sign of encouragement. Though I didn’t particularly enjoy the novel, it did show that stories which dealt with religious themes in a serious, if unconventional manner, could get some traction. I filed Martyr! away as a viable comp title and continued my campaign.

I don’t know how many attempts I made to reach out to publishers, all told. It was several years of abject failure on that front. What kept me going was a sense that, even if I couldn’t get the story published, I was very satisfied in my own right with what I’d created. It truly was unique—a story that could only exist because I had envisioned it. And there were also some small boosts of encouragement that came from a handful of contests and small publishing houses. I actually mailed off a physical copy of the manuscript to a press in Saskatchewan, writing a specific pitch for them. They declined, citing the fact that they just really didn’t think their audience would be into this sort of thing, but they did indicate to me that they felt the story had merit.

That actually happened several times while I was pursuing publication. Numerous times I sent the manuscript off only to have it be rejected, but with a bit of feedback saying that whoever had evaluated it saw potential in it. I submitted it to a British contest—one where I had to pay to gain entry, and pay further for professional feedback. The pros scored the story 4.5 out of 5 stars across 5 metrics (characterization, plot development, etc.) Not too shabby! It gave a me a clear sense that I was onto something and motivated me to keep at it.

Perhaps my closest brush with victory was when I sent it to a publishing contest hosted by an indie press based out of British Columbia—the grand prize being, as you can imagine, publication by said press. This was a Canadian publisher specializing in speculative fiction, and they were looking to promote stories that were set in Canada, written by Canadians, with a speculative element. Right up my alley, I thought. Pneumanauts made it all the way to the final round of selection, beating out 95% of the competition. I know that because they contacted me to let me know that my manuscript was sitting in front of the judges, awaiting their final decision! In the end, however, it was not chosen. I’d come so close, yet was so far. That episode marked the end of a long and intense effort to get the novel published. I made fewer attempts after that, having had my hopes dashed and lost steam, and by the end of 2022, I wasn’t really trying at all. Pneumanauts was thus relegated to the dark corners of my hard drive to collect digital dust.

And so it might have stayed indefinitely, if not for a few small developments in my thinking. The first was a gradual dawning realization which helped to reframe my entire sense of what publication meant: I was a stoner-doom fan, listening to stoner-doom music, part of a stoner-doom enthusiast community, which basically the entire mainstream culture was ignorant of. Many of the bands that I loved released records—excellent records!—without ever being signed by a label. They recorded in their basements, using their own equipment. They organized tours and did promotion by themselves. This is the reality of working in an indie scene, and the indie scene is a self-made world! Why shouldn’t it be like that for writers and novelists? The bands I listened to weren’t waiting for gatekeepers to approve of them before getting their creative labor out there into the world—they were just doing it, and depending on the support of a dedicated and committed underground to keep them afloat.

The second development was my burgeoning interest in theater and playwriting. In the country where I now live, there’s huge support for community-based theater. It’s quite amazing to see—people who live in the same town just getting together and putting on plays for their fellows in the local area, not for profit, but for the love of it. There are competitions and prizes and everything. In becoming attached to a couple of these groups, I was inspired to write new material for them. My first thought, wouldn’t you know it, was to adapt Pneumanauts for the stage. It was an excellent creative exercise and highly rewarding—I’d recommend you try it sometime, if you’re a fellow writer and you’re looking to breathe new life into a story you’ve got languishing somewhere! The result was a fully producible rendition of the novel, which, who knows, maybe I’ll get to put on someday. My theater group held an open play reading for the text and I got a lot of positive feedback. Hearing the characters I’d created be voiced aloud rekindled my interest in the seeing Pneumanauts become more than just a manuscript, but a story for people to read and engage with on their own terms.

It all culminated in the summer of 2024 when I bit the bullet and started a Substack. I’d had an idea of writing publicly ever since sharing Pneumanauts with the members of that theater group. At the time, my goal wasn’t to try and get it published; this publication, in its earliest conceptualization, could be viewed as a kind of spiritual successor to the novel. I simply felt encouraged enough to start putting myself out there in the world and simply see what would happen. Exploring the intersections between science fiction and theology seemed to be what I could uniquely offer. Self-publishing the novel itself—once something I would never have considered, so enamoured with the idea of traditional publication as I once was—was an option on the table, and I was open to doing it once I had a better sense of where the Substack would lead.

I honestly didn’t expect it would lead me here, to writing about this whole journey and relating it to you, my (hopefully) future reader. It was this platform that brought me into contact with the likeminded people at Eclogue Press. I saw what they were looking for and brushed off the old manuscript, made a few quality of life improvements—including carving out two whole chapters which, I now saw, seemed to slow the pace of the beginning section too much—and sent it off, not suspecting at all that it would lead to publication, after all these years.

And then request for the full manuscript came. I’d never made it that far before. I gave the remaining chapters a polish, sent them on, and waited to hear back. The rest, I gather, you can piece together yourself.

What a journey it’s been. Pneumanauts, as you can imagine, is very dear to my heart. I’ve poured countless hours of my life into making it the best, most evocative, most truthful story it can be. I think it’s a story worth sharing—I’ve thought so since it first percolated in my mind, back in 2018. And it’ll be shared with you on August 30th, 2026.

I hope you’ll enjoy it.

*None besides Pneumanauts being published, I should perhaps add. The 0.5 here refers to one novel which I stopped writing after putting over 350,000 words into it. Word of advice: if your debut novel is 350,000 words long and still unfinished, you need to stop writing, start paring back and work on your editing skills! Still, writing that 0.5 novel (itself longer than all the other completed novels I’ve written, combined) and all the others each proved valuable learning experiences, in their own ways. I can see clearly how my craft has developed through the creation of each one.

**I hadn’t read books like Walter M. Niller Jr.’s Canticle for Leibowitz, Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light or Neil Stephenson’s Anathem at the time. I know better now—science fiction and religion, despite the tension between them, have often throve together!

***An excellent example of this is The Sword’s rollicking sci-fi concept album Warp Riders, whose story and artwork served as direct inspiration for Pneumanauts. I even smuggled it in to the novel itself, as one of the characters reads an in-story comic book that riffs on the themes and ideas in the actual album. Give it a listen—it’s one of my favorites of all time!

****Head to my introductory post Welcome to the Pneumanaut! for a more thorough discussion on the matter!

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I’ve been cagey, I’ve been coy. I’ve been sitting on big news for nearly a year now, and I’ve not yet come right out with it and told you. If you read my end-of-2025 post way back when, you might have caught glimmers, titillating glimpses of what lay in store. For reasons that are mysterious even to myself, I’ve not yet mustered the courage to announce in plain, unequivocal terms just what the heck I’m doing here on Substack, what it’s all been building towards. I’ve merely alluded, insinuated, intimated that things—very special things—were in the works.

Things like getting a novel published.

I guess I’ve had a hard time believing it myself. I’ve been holding out, waiting for things to fall through, waiting for the dream bubble to pop and for me to wake up in a cold sweat, wondering what year it is, who’s the President of the United States, what exactly is ‘Substack’—is it like Twitter?—and what on Earth 6-7 is supposed to mean.

But it hasn’t happened. The dream’s still real, or at the very least, it seems doggedly determined to keep up the illusion. And every day we’re getting closer to the fateful moment where we go LIVE, and there’s no longer any shadow of a doubt. I mean, I named my entire publication after this thing—does it really make sense to act like it doesn’t exist, like I haven’t been working up to this moment my entire life?

So, I might as well tell you now, since I’ll have to tell you sooner or later: my full-length novel, Pneumanauts, is being published by this summer.

They are a new indie publisher dedicated to bringing high-quality science fiction stories to underserved audiences—stories that explore the unknown, that interrogate the ‘known’, that search and yearn for the light always. Stories that are a bit different a bit weird, a bit hard to classify, quantify, yet retain some bespoke, irresistable quality that sets them apart from the mainstream. High-quality stories unabashed in their ambition of achieving literary excellence (I won’t say I’ve succeeded in this regard, as you can be the judge), that plumb the depths of the human experience, shying away from nothing; stories that strive to capture what is true, insofar as any none of us can grasp real Truth with a capital ‘T’. And stories that go out there and kick some ass, if we’re being honest with ourselves.

I do believe that I’ve crafted a story like this. The fellows at Eclogue must agree, because they agreed to publish my work and bring it into the world. They’re doing work that I believe in, and they believe in me, so the love’s all mutual—which is a great feeling, let me tell you!

I’m not going to take up too much of your time now, precious as it is. But I will ask that if you’re interested in following me on this journey to publication, I’d be simply over the Moon. I intend to give regular updates and reveal more about the book in due course. I’ll write about what inspired it, what I learned in my efforts to attract agents and win literary competitions, how I curated a killer playlist to get the vibe of the novel just right, how I honed my skills as an editor and taught myself to kill my own darlings, how I learned to not give up and second-guess myself into oblivion, and much, much more. It’s going to be quite the summer, and I can’t wait to get started.

And speaking of journeys…

Without spoiling anything, I can tell you that Pneumanauts is, at its core, a road trip story. It seems to me that road trips stories are very appropriate stories to tell when you want to ponder life, what it all means, what it’s all for. Road trip stories are fundamentally stories about the transformative power of journeying, and we’re all of us on a journey—and I’m not just talking about spiritual ones. We are quite literally situated on a spherical spacecraft sailing through the cosmos at 67,000 mph, never again to revisit the exact point in spacetime that we once occupied. The orbit of the Earth around the Sun, and rotation of the galactic arm, the galaxy itself spinning endlessly through a sea of void; when you think about it, we are all of us sojourners in a deep, profound sense. Who knows where we’re going, or where we’ll end up? Who knows who we’ll become along the way?

A good road trip story offers potential answers. And Pneumanauts is, if nothing else, a good road trip story. But it’s also much more—a story about friendship, brotherhood, heartache, teenage angst, teenage lust, existential crises, drug dealing, racial tension, theology, religiosity, criminality, masculinity, Saskatchewan, Canada at large, desperation, nihilism, violence, love, forgiveness, revelation, resurrection, the End Times and the coming of the New Age. And aliens. It’s a story about aliens, too.

And it all started with a question I asked my Dad in a roadside Tim Horton’s somewhere between Kingston, Ontario and Toronto: If aliens are real, and I’m a Christian—am I supposed to go out there and convert them?

So, if you’d like to sojourn with me for a little while, why not click the Subscribe button below? I can’t wait to share this story with you, dear reader…

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Not the actual cover artwork - official cover to be revealed at a later date!

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