The human supporting cast of Victories Greater than Death

My YA novel Victories Greater Than Death comes out in just one month (preorder here), and I'm going to be sharing a lot on here about the process of writing the book. (And on Insta live, Saturdays at noon PT.)

First up: how I made the human supporting cast!

One thing I really struggled with when I started working on Victories was including other human teenagers.

Early on, I thought maybe Tina could have a bunch of relationships with teens on Earth, but then leave them all behind and go into space on her own.

But a bunch of folks (including my agent, Russ) convinced me that there needed to be other human teens in space with Tina. Right away, I knew one of them had to be Tina's best friend, Rachael (who had more of a spiky relationship with Tina in earlier drafts.)

I liked the idea that Tina has spent years protecting Rachael from bullies and creeps at school, and now she's trying to become the protector of the WHOLE GALAXY, and Rachael can remind Tina that you can't always protect people — it's better to help them protect themselves.

But like I said, the relationship between Tina and Rachael got closer and softened as I revised, and Rachael became more supportive of Tina's dreams of interstellar heroism. There's still that thread of Rachael reminding Tina that she doesn't have to be a superhero always.

So I had one human teenager going into space with Tina. The easy choice was to have other kids from Tina's high school go into space too. Maybe when Tina gets brought up to an alien starship, some other local kids could get pulled up with her by accident?

There are obvious advantages to this. Tina would have existing relationships with these kids. One of them could be a bully that she's been fighting, or a kid she had an unspoken crush on. There could be old dramas that somehow get brought up on the other side of the galaxy.

But the more I poked at it, the more I felt like this wouldn't be fun to write. These human kids would inevitably spend a lot of time complaining about getting dragged along on Tina's adventure. Tina's the one with the heroic destiny, an they're just along for the ride. Whining.

As a side note, in some drafts, Rachael really doesn't want to go on the space voyage with Tina.

When I realized that Rachael would be *psyched* to go into space, and that Tina was the one who might be scared something would happen to her, it got way more fun to write.

Anyway, kids from Tina's high school. I experimented with a thing where a bunch of local teens (not including Tina) notice alien stuff happening and start investigating. Cue Spielbergian scenes of teen alien-hunting club riding around on bikes (or cars), searching for clues.

That way, the other kids could have agency, and they might get pulled into space as a result of their investigation, rather than just being random bystanders. The only problem was this was time-consuming and unwieldy, and we were spending too much time on Earth.

And the thing of forcing Tina to be on a spaceship with the bully she used to fight, or the basketball player she had a crush on, or the drama kid who gets on her nerves, just wasn't as fun as I'd hoped, for various reasons.

I wanted the other kids who come into space to be on their own heroic quests, and to have their own reasons for going to space. I wanted them to be the heroes of their own stories, even if Tina is the book's protagonist.

So I finally hit on a thing where the alien starship is massively understaffed, because they have suffered so many casualties. They need to recruit new crewmembers, even ones who need training, and there's an existing program that can locate the smartest kids on Earth.

(This is a minor minor spoiler, sorry.)

Once I had that, I could make Rachael the one who suggests recruiting some human kids to join the crew, which gives Rachael more fun stuff to work with. (And Tina can be the one with misgivings about it.)

That sequence, where we debate recruiting more kids from Earth, and we figure out the best way to find them, was originally way longer and more complicated, but it got streamlined for pacing.

Anyway, it gave me a way to introduce kids who had their own reasons for leaving home.

Each of those kids has an individual reason for being like "screw it, I'm going to get on this space elevator that just showed up, and see where it takes me." (They get a warning that they may never see their loved ones again if they step on this thing.)

Another benefit of the "recruiting more kids from Earth" thing was, these kids could come from all over the world. I wasn't restricted to Tina's hometown anymore. So I got to have Elza from Brazil, Keziah from the UK, Yiwei from China and Damini from India.

It felt really proper to have humanity represented by kids from all over, rather than everybody being from the United States. And the smartest kids on Earth *ought* to come from everywhere on the globe.

Maybe next time I'll talk more about those kids and how I went about coming up with their backstories (and all the research I did!)