To Die on Foreign Soil
Foreign Soil, as I generally refer to it, is the first project that I personally took from idea, to outline, to finished project, to second draft. I’m currently working on the third draft. The idea came to me when I was sixteen, right after finishing a creative writing course at my local community college. During that course, I had written several small, drabble type pieces of fiction, as we always started the class with five minutes of writing, and several of these drabbles were in the same universe, and several others were scenes easily applicable to a different yet similar setting.
The fiction section of the class ended with a short story project, and I ended up writing the first piece of real fiction in the universe of Foreign Soil, a short story about the invasion of Nawfal following the Nawfalian Revolution. The longtime interstellar rivals of the Nawfalians, the Fyodorians, redirected a carrier group into orbit over the now defenseless Nawfal. The short story focuses on a single woman’s defense of a monastery in the desert, which is housing a cache of artillery. When the Fyodorian Marines attack, the revolutionaries are outmatched, and it ends with a false surrender, before the woman blows herself and several marines up in a final act of defiance.
Foreign Soil takes a slightly different tack. After that class, I wanted to write more in the world of that short story, and explore themes of hard sci-fi and revolution. Foreign Soil focuses on the marines invading Nawfal, rather than the revolution on Nawfal prior to the events of the books. It follows four marines, and one in particular, who see first hand the horrors of war, and find themselves asking the most important question: why are we here? Eventually, these marines answer the question; they are there to further the imperialist ventures of their leaders, and to force a foreign population into submission. They cannot abide by this, and lead a mutiny, seeking to throw off the chains which they have carried to Nawfal.