Erica Vanstone

Pre-Event Assignments - The Cleveland Phoenix (SF)

First Assignment - Act of Story Statement:
Interstellar pirate Iona of Arkan yearns to evacuate her adoptive people from their searing, desolate planet near a dying trinary star–if only they’d let her. When she discovers a charred ship on the edge of the system, Iona takes on a hitchhiker, stranded scientist Freia Fasno, clinging to a ragged, lumpy cloth sack. Whatever’s in the bag attracts the attention of a vengeful high priestess and the nefarious Serpens Communion. Now, Iona has a new problem to tackle: Helping Fasno save the galaxy.

Second Assignment - Antagonist/Antagonist Force Sketch:  
The Cleveland Phoenix weaves together a triad of antagonists, led by antagonistic force, the Serpens Communion–a religious order with a ubiquitous, police-like grip around the Ophiuchus system. The Communion longs to expand into neighboring systems, a process their millennia-old prophecy calls the Alignment.

The prophecy names the Chosen Born as the leader of the Alignment, and the Communion believes D’Liia Kal Elana is that person. A calculating warrior and strategist, D’Liia is the main antagonist–but her connection to the Communion is complicated. Sold to the Communion as a child, their so-called prophecy destroyed everything she’s ever cared about. And when they place her in charge of building a dangerous device, D’Liia develops her own plans.

But the scientist who built the device disappears and D’Liia must hunt him down. She learns he’s joined forces with The Cleveland Phoenix, a ship once owned by Cassander of Arkan–a dead mercenary she hired years ago. But is Cass alive? Or is someone else piloting his ship?

 As D’Liia hunts, a hidden antagonist, Communion priestess and crimson-eyed captain of The Maelstrom, emerges. And she’s been on D’Liia’s tail–and the tail of The Cleveland Phoenix–for decades. Just waiting for D’Liia to make a mistake.

Third Assignment - Breakout Titles:
The Cleveland Phoenix is named after the key ship in the story that unites the main protagonist to her father, and his checkered past as a pirate in his own right. Below are a few other names to explore that capture the action of the manuscript. 

Iona of Arkan
Ophiuchus Rising
The Moros and the Snake Charmer

Fourth Assignment - Comparables:
For this assignment, I chose two comparables by women science fiction writers. Both of these books also feature women protagonists, which was an important goal for me in writing my manuscript as well. I chose these comparables for story structure and writing style.

The Stars Are Legion - Kameron Hurley 
Although my writing style and perspective are quite different from Kameron Hurley's, my story structure and themes are similar: An antagonistic force threatens the galaxy and a female protagonist is key to the resolution. Thematically, I also tackle the concepts of love, motherhood, and how we struggle with--or release--generational baggage.

Ancillary Justice - Ann Leckie 
The second comparable for The Cleveland Phoenix is Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. I love Leckie’s ebullient writing style, and although we use different perspectives for our books, my cadence and tone are similar to Leckie’s in Ancillary Justice. Her use of mixed sentence length, and varying dialogue flow resonates with what I wanted for my manuscript. Additionally, Leckie pulled the first book into a series, and I have written the draft of The Cleveland Phoenix’s sequel, The Chain of Seven. And, of course, the book features a female protagonist.

Fifth Assignment - Hook/Logline:
Interstellar pirate Iona of Arkan is desperate to save her adoptive people from a dying trinary star. But after picking up a stranded scientist, Iona finds herself on the run from the nefarious Serpens Communion and has another problem–saving the galaxy.

alternate hook

Interstellar pirate Iona of Arkan just wants to wolf down a plate of Ligurian narr steak and eggs at the Equatorial Food Hall on Katel, and sketch out a plan to save her adoptive people–after she figures out what her hitchhiker scientist has in his bag…

Sixth Assignment - Conflicts and Hypotheticals:

Primary conflict:  Iona of Arkan is an interstellar pirate…well, more of a privateer, really. A job she took on from her late human father, Cassander–along with his ship, The Cleveland Phoenix, and his persona, a disguise he called the Moros. Before he died years ago, Cass left her with an adoptive warrior clan, the Haroth. Now that she’s grown, Iona's primary concerns are twofold: Staying off the radar of the police-like Serpens Communion and trying to relocate the Haroth from their dying planet–if only they’d let her.

In the meantime, like any space-worthy pirate, Iona operates on credits. When she receives a distress call from stranded scientist Freia Fasno, she smells an opportunity for fast money. Only, Fasno quickly becomes a liability, and his cargo an incredible threat. Forced to run, Iona stumbles across a thread woven into the scientist's dangerous invention, a Communion prophecy, and the decades-old scheme of a vengeful high priestess–all attached to her father’s murky past.

Hypothetical scenario:  Iona of Arkan uses the persona, the Moros, to conduct most of her privateering and pirating work–a black fabric mask with a gruff, electronic translator. It’s an easy way to be less human, less identifiable. But it’s also a way for her to hide from even herself. A hypothetical scenario could be if Iona were to lose the mask, or accidentally destroy it, rendering her unable to use it. Iona would feel naked, exposed. Tapping her old Earthen combat boot, she'd debate engaging with anyone unless she could find her disguise--unable to channel the confidence of her father as she extorts her way across the system.

Secondary conflict:
Iona's secondary conflict is the slow unravelling of her father's past, ignited by the discovery of several bounties the Communion placed on The Cleveland Phoenix years ago. Iona’s father, Cassander of Arkan, had one job–a quick, lucrative Communion contractor-for-hire project in some backwater system, setting up a mine for a rare element. Cass didn’t know what it was for. He didn’t really want to know. And he didn’t like working for the Communion, but the credits on offer were too good to pass up. At least, that’s what he tried to tell himself. But the high priestess in charge of the job, D’Liia Kal Elana–eyes like frozen sapphires–might have been the real reason he couldn’t seem to walk away.

Cassander's history unfolds through his eyes, and the eyes of the “Chosen Born,” D’Liia. The high priestess is now the leader of the Communion’s movement to take over the neighboring systems, the Alignment. She’s been plotting to build and take on the device for years, refusing to let anything get in her way. But there's a fly in the ointment: D’Liia believes Cassander of Arkan is dead. So, when Freia Fasno, creator of the Communion’s top-secret device, escapes with the help of Cass’s old ship, The Cleveland Phoenix, D’Liia begins to wonder if perhaps he’s alive after all. Either way, she needs to get her hands on Freia Fasno’s device–no matter who’s captaining The Cleveland Phoenix.

Hypothetical scenario: As the leader of the Alignment, D’Liia is desperate to get her hands on The Cleveland Phoenix, control Fasno’s device, and learn the identity of the captain. If the Communion, not D’Liia, were to get their hands on The Phoenix first, she would lose her ability to control the weapon. And the Communion might get their hands on Cass, a human she thought was long dead. Anxiety causes D'Liia her to bite at her thumb, dig a fingernail into her palm. But the strategic high priestess would look for another way around the Communion, around the problem. She’s waited almost twenty years to carry out her brand of justice, her own personal Alignment, and any setback is just that—an opportunity to find a new way through.

Protagonist inner conflict:
Iona desperately wants to help the Haroth–mainly because she’s eager to absolve what they call the Debt of Raising, a selfless act that triggers passage into adulthood. It means true acceptance into the clan. And as a human raised by Haroth, she’s always felt somewhat on the outside. To heal this rift, Iona’s big idea is to help them evacuate their planet. Only they dismiss her concerns as premature, making her feel irrelevant. Overly cautious. Gaslighted.

Worse, her biological family–Cassander’s family–the Arkans, are constantly pestering her to return. But she’s not ready to do that, not ready to see her father’s grave on the Arkan ship. Not yet.

Still, when she uses her father’s ship and persona–the Moros–to extort and pirate, Iona feels more connected to who he was instead of who she is. Or who she could be. Before she can find clarity, Teelar scientist Freia Fasno throws a wrench in her plans and instead presents a new problem, a new question to answer: Who is Iona of Arkan to the galaxy?

Seventh Assignment - Setting Sketch:
The Cleveland Phoenix takes place eighty-one lightyears from a decimated Earth, halfway to the outer rings of the Milky Way, in Star Year 2737. Though humans survived a series of solar storms on Earth centuries ago, they sent ships–Arkan generation ships–out into the galaxy to find new homes. Iona of Arkan’s biological family now drifts, living a nomadic life on such a ship, near what humans once called Ophiuchus–a loose gathering of stars the Serpens Communion named The Bearer. 

The Bearer acts as the hub of three linked collections of systems: More of a triangle of stars with lanky arms and feet, the Bearer merges with the Serpent, a line creating the main trade route across the system. Both hover over the Scorpion–a chain of seven major stars–and home to Antares, seat of the Communion.

Like her father before her, Iona skulks along the trade routes in these systems. Sometimes working freelance for the Mining Magistrate–more of a commodities union than a formal government. Sometimes upgrading The Phoenix with chemical plating, or eating Ligurian narr steak and eggs on Katel, a tidally locked purple rock that acts as the system’s food and fuel station, revolving in a perpetual golden-hued twilight.

Lazy and overbearing, the Communion putters about the systems, eliminating threats in the form of casual policing on places like Katel, or Rolphos X–known as RX–home to the system’s largest gaming casino, The Lesath. Here, Martites, Vikaanians, and even Sochen traders lose credits at the Varlinder-Jay tables, while the Communion keeps expectant fingers on the pulse of the galaxy’s goings-on.

Iona’s adoptive family, the Haroth, live in the Marfik system, a dying furnace of a trinary star with one inhabited planet, the red-rock-lined Rynek. The Haroth spend the planet's molten days on Rynek in a cool, cavernous underground city, emerging at night to build cooking fires under the glow of the Broken Moon—an oblong, misshapen object that hugs the planet in a loose orbit.

Planets like Rynek are the chief concern of Teelar scientist Freia Fasno--planets with unforgiving, dying suns. On the other side of the system, he tests his device on Eta Aquilae–a white dwarf star nearing its final days in the galaxy. When he runs to the Marfik system to evade the Communion, he’s picked up by Iona. Together, the two run to even deeper, less-frequented parts of the galaxy, including Gerelium, a distant exomoon teeming with life—and revealing other secrets linked to Iona's past.

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Hello! Thanks for reading the first scene of The Cleveland Phoenix, a science fiction/adventure manuscript. The chapter below introduces the protagonist, the antagonist, and the primary conflict of the novel, as well as the setting and tone. 

Chapter 1: Dortollen Licorice
Star Year 2722 – Shaula System – Fifteen Years Ago

Cassander of Arkan didn’t believe the Vikaanians. 

The human’s face bunched to one side, skeptical. Watching the time, he raised an eyebrow behind his portable oxygen generator–a black fabric mask cradling a translator insert and a long, clear tube running to a palm-sized box in the pocket of his jacket. The box clicked every few seconds or so, muffled, marking intervals of time as he waited for the Vikaanians to respond. He tapped his forefinger on the communications console. 

“Moros,” came the Vikaanians through the communications array’s translator, finally. “We told you; we have no such items on board.”

Cass sat in the co-captain’s chair of The Cleveland Phoenix, just outside the Shaula system, half a million kilometers from the nearest planet’s outer rings. The Phoenix, a silver, bat-like mishmash of a Dortollen trading vessel, hovered nose-to-nose with the Vikaanians' Illustra, an insectoid, yellow maintenance ship half its size. But there was more to the Illustra than met the eye. And Cass knew it. 

He inhaled, muting the channel, and turned to the captain’s chair, to the person sitting in it, also human. 

“What do we think?” he asked through the mask. The mechanical translator insert made his voice gruff, digital. It spilled out a Vikaanian dialect, but his Earth English underneath rang clear. “Do we believe the Vikaanians?”

Dangling her legs from the captain’s chair, Cassander’s almost-six-year-old daughter, Iona of Arkan, shook her head. Eyes bright and blue, like sparks of cosmic dust, her response caused a mass of brown curls to bounce around her face--around those eyes. 

Cass pulled his black mask down, revealing a smirk. It was all for show: The Moros and the mask. A persona. He squinted his deep brown eyes as he leaned towards her and dropped his voice, low. 

“I don’t believe ‘em either, Baby Blues,” he said, shaking his head in solidarity, then dropping a finger on her nose. She grinned wide, showing off one single new front tooth, and one gap where a tooth was freshly missing. Another oxygen generator rested in the chair next to her.

The girl returned to fiddling with a pair of charcoal, grown-up gloves from the seat next to her, smoothing them on. Wiggling her fingers into the oversized lumps of fabric.

Cass placed the mask and translator back over his face, then reopened the channel to the Vikaanians, clearing his throat.

“The Garton ice mammoth you stole those tusks from would disagree,” Cass said, raising both eyebrows. “Black market price right now is one hundred…one-fifty credits per tusk? Let’s see. And the average Garton ice mammoth has…” 

He turned to his daughter again, holding up five fingers, waving them in the air. She shook her head, revealing all five gloved fingers on one hand, plus another on the second: Six total.

“Six tusks,” Cass said into the communications array. The girl nodded.

A Garton ice mammoth wasn’t something he had ever encountered alive; they were endangered, elusive. Not that he shied away from the clandestine. But the credits for their tusks were lucrative. And he knew the Vikaanians knew that. Especially when they’d picked up the contraband a few lightyears back, right under the nose of the Mining Magistrate–his boss, for the moment.

“What do you want, pirate?” came the Vikaanians’ lagging response. Cass wagged his head side-to-side, not so much a pirate as a privateer. But he let it slide.

“Well, that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of six to nine-hundred credits they’ll fetch,” said Cass, the Moros, leaning back in his chair. “It’s worth at least that to stay off the radar of the Magistrate. You wouldn’t want them to know one of their Vikaanian service ships is dealing in illegal commodities.” 

Silence followed Cassander’s ask.  

“Or maybe you would?” He shrugged, folding his hands together.

“You hold our vessel hostage to extort us?” the Vikaanian asked. Cass snorted.

“That’s…that’s a bit dramatic,” he said, reaching over to a bay of green and yellow switches. “You call it extortion; I call it doing you a favor. But you’re welcome to leave any ti-...oh, but your fuel stores are empty. Huh.” The Phoenix’s magnetic fuel decontainment system had done its job, causing the Illustra’s plasma tanks to hemorrhage precious fuel out into space.

“How’d that happen?” He finished turning a few switches off and gave his daughter a wink. She winked back, flashing a tooth and a top row of pink gums.

“What do you want, Moros?” the Vikaanian asked, growling.

Iona climbed out of the captain’s chair, revealing a copper booster seat underneath her. She skipped over to the co-captain’s chair and pulled at her father’s shirtsleeve. Cass turned his head. The girl stood on her tiptoes against the side of his chair and whispered into his ear. He nodded, mouth curling up as her hair tickled his ear. 

The Moros lifted her into his lap and opened the manifest of the Vikaanians’ ship he’d been hacking into on a holographic display. Iona scrolled through the lines of orange lights and pointed at an item on the list. 

“Let’s say seven hundred credits and the three kilograms of Dortollen licorice you have in that cargo hold,” Cass said, looking his daughter in the eye. Iona grinned, nodding.  

An alarm sounded on the sensor array. Cass jumped to the interface to look at the source. He pulled his mask down, furrowing his brow at the ship’s proximity scanner, blinking an angry red. The human’s eyes grew wide. Another ship approached: The Maelstrom. 

“No, no, no, no–not again,” Cass breathed from outside his mask.

“Sir,” said the Phoenix’s computer, Argos. 

“I see it, Argos,” he said. Cass pulled his daughter off his lap. “Harness up, kiddo.” The five-year-old trotted back to the captain’s chair, climbed in, and pulled on a pint-sized green cloth harness.

“Illustra,” he said, reopening the channel, “better make it fast. We’ve got visitors.”

“And if we don’t?” asked the Vikaanian ship’s captain. Cass squinted at the time, running a hand through his chestnut hair. Ten solar minutes. 

“Up to you,” he said, keying coordinates into the gray navigation console’s concave white buttons. “You can hand over the items and we’ll leave you alone. Or we can stick around a little longer and let our new guests see you hobnobbing with The Cleveland Phoenix. I recommend the first option if you’d like to sleep in your own bed again. Ever.” 

“Sir, the slipstream signature is Communion,” Argos said. 

“Gathered that, thanks Argos.” 

The human inhaled, preparing The Phoenix’s slipstream drive for emergency activation. Then, he used both hands to scratch his head and kept his hands on the back of his neck, frozen. Waiting. Either way, he was ready. Quarry or no quarry. 

“Stand by for transport, Phoenix,” said the Vikaanian ship, at last. Cass exhaled, checking the distance of the incoming Serpens Communion ship. He figured he had ten solar minutes, tops–plenty of time to grab the licorice, the credits, and run. But still. 

“Congratulations,” Cass said, initiating the external docking gear, “you made the right choice. But shake a tailfeather, Illustra.” The docking port extensions began groaning into place on the outside of the ship. He entered slipstream coordinates on the console in front of him, just to be ready. 

“Tail…feather?” the Vikaanians asked. The translator sometimes fumbled with Earth English, especially the figurative. 

“It means hurry up.” The pirate shook his head. He tapped a finger against the console again and looked at his daughter. She saluted her father with two gloved fingers at her temple. Cass returned the salute with a half-smile, but it faded as he eyed the time again. He re-opened the channel.

“By the way, Illustra…The Cleveland Phoenix was never here. For both of our sakes.”