Writing “Between Earth and Exile”

When I was fifteen, I rented an animated movie that for the first time made me wonder "What would I do?" if I was in that situation, and not in a good way. Vengeance of the Space Pirate was the censored and dubbed version of the 1981 anime movie Arcadia of My Youth, and it was not a heroic adventure. Though I hadn't realized it at the time, about half of the most objectionable scenes (usually of people getting shot/killed, or scenes of dead people) were removed or shortened, but the dialogue was left surprisingly intact.

For the first time I experienced a story where the good guys didn't save the world. The movie starts out with humanity having been subjugated by an alien race, and that doesn't change by the end. Harlock, the lead character, finds his own freedom, but he's not a freedom fighter. He doesn't try to save or inspire a people who have essentially given up.

At the end of the movie he is declared an enemy of Earth and told to leave the planet. He agrees to do so, but before he goes, he asks if anyone would go with him, knowing that they could never return.

I had never been challenged with a future this bleak in anything I’d seen or read up until this point, and as I watched Harlock leave with the people who would follow him, I couldn’t help wondering, "Would I have the guts to go? Could I have left my family? Could I leave knowing that my life on Earth would amount to nothing, but only hardship and exile would lie with Harlock?"

"Between Earth and Exile" is about a young woman who made the choice to follow her captain into exile, but after six years of fighting and scrabbling to get by, proposes a way to return to Earth and rescue her family.

This story spent years on the drawing board and went through a number of titles, from "Exile's Sorrow" to "Adolescence in Exile" to the final "Between Earth and Exile" which I think is the strongest. It was originally a much shorter story, the second half as it currently exists was not in the original draft, and I wasn't happy with the ending. I changed it twice before the final version. Alexa was always intended to lose in order to draw a parallel between her and Captain Mercer, but the circumstances of the loss changed over time.

The first ending had her in one of the Bloodborne's shuttles (the frigate didn't even exist) with three other people rather than a crew. They flew all the way to Earth to rendezvous with the transport and Alexa actually used her piloting skills during the skirmish against some Alcaltan fighters to try to save her family. But Alcaltan reinforcements arrived, including a cruiser, so our space pirates were forced to pull back back from a battle they wouldn't be able to survive.

I didn't like this ending because Alexa speny a lot of it an emotional wreck and in denial. She had to be convinced to withdraw rather than making the call on her own. This was also the only ending where Mercer offered to let her know what happened to her family after they were apprehended. Alexa refused, because if she doesn't hear they're dead she still has hope. Mercer's line "I would not have wasted the schematics on a fool’s errand" existed even back then, but because of the way things played out, it came off like he was chewing her out rather than expressing support for her initiative.

It didn't help that the fight scene was pretty limp and not well thought out. I knew I didn't want Alexa to go by herself, but there was no clear chain of command and fighting came down to "Everybody do stuff!"

The second draft is really where the story took shape. This introduced the death of Kellen, gravity technology, and the capture of the frigate that would be used what was now the second half of the story. Substituting in the frigate battle over the one with the shuttle almost doubled the length of the story, but it was worth it.

Now the battle took place in the outer edges of the solar system and used larger ships instead of smaller fighter craft. There was a chain of command and everyone on board (or at least on the bridge) had a clear role.

But… but… there was a problem when they turned around to withdraw. They were heavily damaged, being chased by a lone corvette, as they are in the final version, and I needed some way to save them. And at the time I thought, well, if I want Alexa to really feel like she isn't cut out for leadership, the worst thing would be to have Mercer show up and save her. Because then it would look like he never had confidence in her at all.

I admit I'm a little sad that I had to take out the Space Battleship Yamato-inspired Implosion Cannon, but having the Bloodborne show up to pull the frigate's butt out of the fire and annihilate the corvette didn't feel very satisfying. Even though I wanted Alexa to feel less competent than she actually is, I also wanted her to escape on her own.

Still, I sat on that ending for two years before I landed on the missile pod orbiting around Varuna idea, which is a tactic I cribbed from Arpeggio of Blue Steel, a futuristic submarine series. I had to make some changes due to being in space rather than underwater, but I liked the idea of a separate launch platform that an enemy would not expect, and this allows Alexa to make her final attack and save her crew while they're on their last legs.

There were other nips and tucks along the way. Alexa's engineer, Caleb, had a larger role at one point as her surrogate big brother, but most of the changes were along the lines of her interactions with Mercer, who I had to write a fine line around. Since the story is told in first person, we see him through Alexa's hero-worshipping eyes, so bringing out his humanity and the fact he is fallible as well, was harder. If I ever write another story set in this universe I'll probably choose a different POV character.

Between Earth and Exile can be read on Kindle in the April 2017 issue of Deep Magic.

Music listened to while writing: Soundtracks from Arcadia of My Youth and Skies of Arcadia (the latter not related) and "Ichiban no Takaramono (Yui version)" sung by LiSA. "Ichiban no Takaramono" (Most Precious Treasure) was not an entirely appropriate choice, because the lyrics don’t match the situation of the story, but the vocalist does such a great job of portraying the pain expressed in the lyrics that I couldn’t help but think of Alexa.