Mapping the Cosmos: Planning The Brightstar Trilogy from Chaos to Hope

For some time now, I’ve had in mind an idea for a trilogy of fictional novels. After finishing Nuff Sed: A Novel of Desert Steve last year, I began thinking through and researching. As I begin to gather information for the first in the trilogy, I realized that I really needed to map out the entire trilogy before beginning to write the first volume.

I am more of an “outliner” than a “pantser.” (I would actually say that the outlines I write allow me to then become a pantser, but one with some structured direction. I want my books to be serious literature, with all the structural, symbolic, and thematic content and arcs, as well as being entertaining.)

This trilogy will be science fiction, continuing a lot of my favorite themes of chaos, loss, despair, as well as perseverance, grace, and hope. (I do sometimes wonder if being multi-genre is a good idea for an author, but that’s a post for another day.) I also chose science fiction because of the current interest and advances in space travel by both nation-states and private companies, with rockets taking off every few days somewhere on Earth. Furthermore, science fiction provides an opportunity to address current issues in this world, from a distance, enabling (hopefully) a better perspective from outside our own viewpoint.

I’ve almost finished the outlining for the entire trilogy. Presently, I am calling it The Brightstar Trilogy. The working title for each:

• Part 1: Seven Planets
• Part 2: Two Dragons
• Part 3: Twelve Foundations

Here’s my current brief description of the trilogy:

• Setting: A colonized solar system, governed by the fragile Solar Concord, where Dr. Elias Vorn uncovers a mysterious signal from beyond the Kuiper Belt.
• Protagonist: Dr. Elias Vorn, a disgraced astrophysicist whose journey drives the narrative from isolation to cosmic leadership.
• Themes: Unveiling hidden truths, power and corruption, chaos preceding transformation, suffering from cosmic forces, and hope amid destruction.

So far, I have 30 named characters, 15 locations, and 22 total chapters (for the entire trilogy). I have an outline for all chapters for the trilogy already, and am now finishing up brief outlines for the scenes within each chapter of the first volume, Seven Planets.

Here are the main characters:

• The secondary protagonist is Dr. Mara Kael, Elias’s former colleague. A signal processing expert based on Titan, Mara becomes Elias’s key ally after he reaches out for help decoding the signal’s directive. She provides technical expertise and challenges his assumptions.
• The first antagonist is Lena Voss, a high-ranking official in the Solar Concord, overseeing Station Prime in Earth Orbit. She remembers Elias’s disgrace and views him with contempt, embodying the Concord’s corruption and inflexibility.
• Other protagonists (major and minor), allies, rivals, guides, and more will appear throughout the trilogy.
• The protagonist is Dr. Elias Vorn, is a 42-year-old disgraced military astrophysicist who pioneered cosmic radiation analysis. Falsified data five years before securing funding, leading to his exile at the Neptune Orbital Observatory (NOO-7) after losing his reputation and relationships, notably with Dr. Mara Kael. His past actions inadvertently woke the signal, tying him to a galactic crisis.

I spent about ten months researching ideas, backgrounds, the solar system, propulsion systems, terraforming, and so on. Likewise, I then spent another two or three months thinking and making notes about characters—my novels are character- and event-driven, even though science fiction. I research the science (technology, physics, astronomy, etc.), but I want it to lay in the background of the story, and let the characters and plot be the driving action (unlike much “hard science fiction”).

I now have eight chapters for the first volume (this can always change as I begin writing the first draft, of course.

1. Signal in the Void
2. Echoes of Earth Orbit
3. Shadows on the Moon
4. Solar Storms and Shadows
5. Dust and Defiance
6. Beneath the Ice
7. Fire Beneath the Haze
8. The Seventh Wave

Once I finish my brief treatments of each chapter’s scenes, I’ll begin writing the first draft next week. At that point, everything above could evolve and change!

Have any other writers out there written trilogies or such? Any advice, pitfalls, joys, etc.?

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