Ludmila, My Love is my fourth novel, and one that I really didn’t plan on writing.
I’ve got a tonne of ideas – as with most writers, more ideas than I can possibly write books for during my lifetime – and while I’m writing the first draft of one book, part of my mind is already looking/thinking ahead to the next. While Empire State was in progress, I was planning on another superhero novel, this time set in Edwardian London, called The City, Golden. I’d even got so far as to make some notes during downtime on Empire State, and had a cast of characters sketched out and the major plot points jotted down.
One thing I discovered that happens when you write in the long form – one wonderful and quite surprising thing – is that even if you have a plot, or outline, or synopsis, and think you have the whole story worked out from beginning to middle to end, you have very little control over your characters. They start to do things you didn’t intend, start making their own decisions, and going off in directions that were not only unplanned, but actually work against what you’d plotted out.
I told this to a non-writer friend, and at first he thought I was making it up, and then when I’d convinced him that this actually happens, he thought I was barking. I’m sure I’m not the first writer to be told this. But that’s okay, it’s our little secret.
But I digress. Back to The City, Golden and Ludmila, My Love. Both titles with commas in them, too. I’m not sure if that is significant or not!
Anyway, so there I was planning this Edwardian superhero adventure when Ludmila arrived in my mind, and told me that I really needed to tell her story. And yes, that bit does sound barking, but hey, I tried to lead you up to it, right?
As a fan of the weird and anomalous (Fortean Times is the only magazine I ever read from cover to cover), I’ve been interested in the so-called “Lost Cosmonauts” for years. The story goes that back in the 1960s, in a mad and desperate bid to beat the United States at the space race, the USSR sent up a large number of cosmonauts who never made it back. Yuri Gagarin, it turns out, was the first person to go into space, and come back alive.
It’s probably a load of bunk, but sometimes the things which are bunk are the most interesting. It’s a mystery wrapped in Cold War paranoia and Soviet dirty-dealings, and while it might never have happened, maybe it did. Afterall, the Soviets were up to all sorts – Stalin had people airbrushed out of photos, and the Soviet space agency destroyed a lot of files. As the fortean mantra goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
It was actually Fortean Times that brought the subject back to mind last year, with a feature about how two Italian radio enthusiasts had actually recorded the transmissions of some of these lost cosmonauts as they perished in space. The best recording – or perhaps worst, depending on your point of view – is of a female cosmonaut, apparently reporting back to mission control as her capsule burns up on re-entry. Although there is no record of her ever existing, someone decided her name was Ludmila.
Ludmila, My Love, is a supernatural space opera, M.R. James writes 2001: A Space Odyssey, in three acts. I’ve just finished the first one at around 43,000 words. As ever, my target is 100,000 words, and I hope to be finished by the end of May.
It’s a story of loss, betrayal and revenge, and of an impossible love that spans a thousand years. I was lucky enough to have a sketch done live on the internet as part of professional artist Brandon Dayon’s regular drawing webscasts, thanks to a cheeky request made by Twitter pal Kate Sherrod. As Brandon said during his webcast, it doesn’t look like Ludmila is having a very good day.
And to help things crystalise in my mind, the fake back cover blurb:
Abraham Idaho Cleveland (Ida, to his friends), decorated veteran and war hero, sure has some tales to tell. Not that anyone wants to hear them. Injured in battle and forced into retirement, Ida is exiled to a distant outpost to recuperate.
On the decommissioned space station ‘Coast City’, Commandant Price Eldridge and his skeleton crew resent playing babysitter, and Ida finds himself shunned by nearly everyone. His only friend, medic Izanami, helps him rehabilitate after his final heroic act, one which nobody believes ever happened.
Nobody, that is, except for his new love: a woman a galaxy away, on the other end of his subspace radio. A woman he’s never met, but with whom Ida shares the pain of loss.
A woman with a dark secret all of her own.
When fast-talking celebrity pilot Zia Hollywood arrives with her crew, leading the great space gold rush en route to plundering a strange new asteroid, the persecution of Ida only worsens. Until, that is, her mining ship is scuttled in deep space under mysterious circumstances that Zia refuses to discuss with anyone. Anyone except her surprising new confidant, Ida.
Something is out there, in the dark shadows between the stars.Something lonely, waiting, watching. Wanting.
As Ida and Zia face the demons of the past, they must each make a choice. How much would you sacrifice if could get a second chance to save the ones you’ve loved and lost?
