Creating Blue Dust #1

Blue Dust is a sci-fi audio fiction series that I created and released in 2022. It tells the story of a teenager named Max returning to his old home, a floating mega-city, to find his father and get his old life back. You can listen on any major podcasting platform, or at https://anchor.fm/blue-dust

I had the idea for Blue Dust 15 years ago. Back then, Blue Dust was called Plus 7, and tiny remnants of that name remain, such as the “Plus Corporation,” who once surveilled and controlled activity in the city. I believe the “7” denoted the seven levels of the city, but my memory of how that worked has faded. Now the city only has three levels — the Upper Ward, the Lower Ward, and the Deep Grid. Although the Deep Grid was a recent invention, the Upper and Lower Wards are named after areas in Planescape: Torment, an important cRPG in my teenage years.

Originally in Plus 7, Max wasn’t estranged from his father, and he grew up on Earth with his two buddies, Trigs and Bung. Although Trigs changed only a little in the intervening 15 years, Bung, who was once a burly boy of 15–16, became the 10-year old curious, but largely clueless, son of Jed and Sue. Together, they would come to represent a successful family unit, banding together to face the many adversities of living in a vault on a storm-torn Earth. Ideas of family and working together are difficult for Max, and together Tom’s family act as a mirror to Max’s own selfishness and self-centredness.

Plus 7 began with Max, Trigs and Bung breaking into a designated junk drop from the floating city. Their aim was to steal as many parts that were otherwise impossible to procure on Earth, while avoiding the Stegosaurus, or “Stegs” bikers, so-called for the painful augmentation all initiates go through, where metal plates are grafted to an individual’s spine and jut out of their skin. They otherwise wear leather jackets and swagger around, hellbent on inflicting pain.

Eventually, Max and the crew smuggle themselves on a dropship and go to the impossibly technologically advanced city, where they eventually meet Vertov, a rebel who has positioned cameras all around the city and is trying to fight back against the overreaching Plus Corporation. Vertov and Trigs initially had no familial ties at all.

Over the many years of cyclically dropping and returning to the project, the story shed some details, but mostly accreted ideas, story parts and eventually whole characters. Although the city was originally filled with Tatooine-esque bandits, merchants and aliens, most of these were dropped, except for the pherons. The idea of blue dust was an idea I flirted with for many years. For a long time it acted as a kind of super-charged performance-enhancing drug for the gangs of the Lower Ward, if they could handle the dizzying comedown.

The purpose of blue dust as an idea evolved along with the story, especially with the introduction of Annie, Max’s father, their links to the pherons, and some other aspects of the story that I have no intention of divulging here.

At sometime around the 3rd draft of the story, I started to change as a writer. Up until then I’d always made things up as I went along, bashing my way through, feeling the excitement of creation and writing in tandem. Unfortunately, this usually didn’t make for compelling storytelling.

I knew that I needed to get away from this seat-of-the-pants approach, as it’s often referred to, and learn to plan.

Immediately, I started reading. I read mountains of blog posts, especially from Janice Hardy and I bought at least 15 books on “how to write”. From these some very clear lessons came through, including to:

(I use “their” rather than the clunky “his/her” for ease of use)

1. Focus on the main character. Make sure they have an internally consistent worldview.
2. Give the main character a need — a lack — in their life. What does the main character want most in the world? Why can’t they get it? How do they think they can get it?
3. Make side characters mirrors for your main character. Although these characters should have desires and needs, they should also reveal something about the main character, even if the main character doesn’t realise it.
4. The main character’s actions should feel inevitable because of their personality. Nothing should seem random.
5. Action is followed by reaction. Consider how what happens makes the character feel in their body, emotionally, are mentally. Eventually, their reaction should lead to a new goal.

And the list goes on…

By far the most influential book among these was Lisa Cron’s Wired For Story. I had so many “AHA!” moments in the book that I ran out of sticky notes to stick to its many wise and illuminating pages. The lessons from her book, in a very real sense, made Blue Dust what it is today.

I’ll continue in future posts, where I’ll go into more detail about how I linked Blue Dust’s characters together, common writing strategies I would employ, and eventually how I started creating Blue Dust as an audio fiction series!

Thank you for reading!