Much of this post’s content consists of information I’ve shared before across various media over the years, but I know I’ve got some new faces along for the ride these days, so I thought it would be kind of fun/interesting/enlightening/insert-adjective-here to compile everything in one place. Maybe you’ve read my work, but do you know its origins? How much do you really know about its semi-insane creator? Brace yourselves—I might get a little long-winded here 😉
THE EARLY DAYS
I’m not sure exactly when I “started” writing. I know I played with some Jurassic Park fan fiction in 5th or 6th grade—it was based on the characters my best friend and I played as in the PC game “Danger Zone” that came out at the same time as Jurassic Park III. Great fun. In 5th grade, we also did a really cool project where we wrote, illustrated, then bound and covered our own books; we then had to go out and read them to the other elementary classes, and the class assignment depended on the maturity level of the book. I was absolutely petrified because I had to read to the 6th graders, which maybe tells you something about my story, haha (not me already attempting to write a thriller at age 11).
Behold, the most embarrassing piece of artwork ever: the very first concept art of Ziva Payvan to ever rear its ugly head.
Fast forward a couple of years to junior high. I’d been into Star Wars since ~4th grade, but at this point, a couple of my nerdy friends had created some original characters in the SW universe and kept talking about them in our AIM group chat (ah, those were the days). They started kinda acting out this story via chat and sucked me into it, so I just played along as Leia since the story was supposed to take place in the Rebellion era. It actually ended up being a lot of fun, and we got this whole crazy thing going with an original plot. When we were done with a session, I’d take the transcripts from our chat and write up the story in prose form, and we’d keep it going from where we left off every time. Needless to say, it got completely out of control and so much of it made no logistical sense whatsoever, but that’s what started to get me interested in writing more complex stories. Sci-fi stories.
It was at some point during these role-playing games that I needed an extra character for a sequence, so I threw together “Ziva.” I was obsessed with NCIS at the time, and Ziva David had just been introduced, so I thought it would be a cool exotic-sounding name. She was a horribly clichéd mixture of like 3 different characters from all the popular mid-2000s action TV shows I liked (e.g. 24/Jack Bauer). Honestly, I think some of these traits still spill over to what we see in parts of Dakiti, which is a little cringey, but obviously can’t be helped now. Regardless, I ended up really liking her. Here I was wanting to start writing more seriously, and I’d just created an original character. I was like, “Hmm, I could do something with this.”
An aesthetic collage I made a couple of years ago for my FBI story; the theme was “scrapped projects” and I thought it would be fun to dig the concept back out.
I ended up getting another project going that involved a team of FBI agents in the present-day US. It was also an absolutely clichéd mishmash of 24, NCIS, etc. A lot of it made no sense because I was just trying to combine all these plot elements that I thought were cool but didn’t actually fit together. I eventually completed the story, which felt like a major accomplishment since 99% of my previous writing consisted of that crazy never-ending SW story. Unfortunately, I have no idea how long it was because I deleted it after a few years, something I regret majorly. Pro tip: never delete any of your writing, no matter how terrible you think it is. On the bright side, the sequel I started ended up serving as the basis for Nexus, so in that sense it feels like all was not lost.
branching out
Throughout the course of high school, I started coming up with ideas for other characters and concepts that might exist within Ziva’s world. I wrote up a few random little one-shot scenes starring some of these characters, just to see what they “looked like.” Skeet, Zinni, Aroska, Emeri, and even Adin all got their starts this way. This also goes to show you just how long Ziva has been living rent-free in my head.
Meanwhile, in my sophomore English class, one semester focused on fiction writing. The first major exercise was to fully develop an original character. It felt like cheating to use any of the characters I already had lurking in my head, so I went ahead and made up a different person totally unrelated to our Star Wars fanfic or even sci-fi. The next project was to write up an outline for a 300+ page novel starring that character. I remember being incredibly relieved that we didn’t have to actually write a 300-page novel, because “omg, I could never do that.” It ended up being such a fun project though—I powered through it in like 3 days while some of my less imaginative classmates really struggled to come up with ideas. I started using some of the character development tricks we’d learned to delve deeper into my other Star Wars and sci-fi characters.
Side note: my English teacher who had us do that project was my first customer at my direct bookstore and ordered a signed copy of Dakiti. I wrote her a note reminiscing about the project; she found the assignment in some of her old papers and reminded me that it had even said, “Remember, if you become a published writer, I want a signed copy of your first book!”
A snippet from that last Star Wars story I wrote. Classic Ziva is classic. Some things about a character never change, regardless of what universe they live in.
I wrote one more story that was still technically set in the Star Wars universe, but aside from a brief scene set on Tatooine, it was completely original and only included Ziva and a couple of my friends’ characters. My goal up to this point was simply to make every story I wrote longer than the last; this story was completed and clocks in just shy of 22,000 words. I still have it in the depths of my writing folders, along with the SW roleplay fanfic, which eventually fizzled out. Drives me bonkers that I kept both of these but got rid of the FBI stories.
Fun fact: while circumstances and characters were obviously different, much of the structure of this story ended up serving as the basis for the general conflict in Embers. It felt so good to once again be able to recycle old work in some manner.
Back in those days, I started just titling all my work “Ziva vs. [insert villain/entity name here].” It made it easy for me to keep track of which story was which, and it didn’t matter if the titles were lame and unimaginative because my nerdy friends were the only people I ever planned on sharing my work with. When that final SW story was done, I officially plucked Ziva and all the other concepts I’d been playing with out of the Star Wars universe and stuck them in a world of their own where they were free to flourish. My senior year of high school (we’re talking 2009 - 2010), I began working on my first fully original story.
It was titled Ziva. vs. Dakiti.
THE CHARACTERS
There are still definitely some parallels between the old Star Wars stories and my current work (e.g. Federation/Resistance backstory and structure). I think just about any sci-fi story is going to have parallels with other sci-fi media. In Ziva’s case specifically, the origin of her scar is currently the same as it used to be (see her original concept sketch near the beginning of this post).
But there were also a number of details from Ziva’s development that carried over to the development of the other characters and the entire Haphezian culture (side note: “Haphez” was a name I made up totally on the fly, and I’ve always kind of hated it, but I’ve been past the point of no return for a looong time). For example, “Payvan” is based on Canadian volleyball player Sarah Pavan, pronounced with a short A. The commentators mispronounced it “PAY-van” during a match once and I ran with it. But Sarah Pavan is also 6’5”, which is why I decided Ziva should be 6’5”, which in turn sparked the idea that, as a superhuman race, all the Haphezians should be taller than average humans.
Similarly, there was a commercial for an LG TV that aired back in the day featuring a woman with red eyes. I thought that looked super cool and decided Ziva should also have red eyes (and because red is my favorite color), then decided all the Haphezians should have vivid, abnormally colored eyes and maybe even hair. It’s a little cheesy, sure—I was in high school, can you blame me? LOL. But after a while, the concepts stuck.
Skeet and Zinni came about next and actually originated as custom minifigures in a Lego video game; I was using any and every opportunity to visualize these new characters I was creating (I also played a LOT of The Sims back in the day). And actually, during initial development, Zinni’s character was supposed to be male. I can’t remember when or why I decided to change it—obviously before I started writing her. They were designed to be classic sidekick characters, backing Ziva up as the protagonist, maybe adding a little comic relief. They’ve come a long way since then and can always be counted upon to carry a given scene.
Aroska showed up a bit later, first appearing as a Random Side Character™ in a little scene I threw together where he, Adin, and Ziva did a target shooting demo for Emeri and the Royal Officer. It was tricky figuring out exactly who I wanted his character to be. In early drafts of a story that got scrapped, he was the soft-spoken but capable leader of the Beta special ops team (rather than Alpha field ops) who was hunting Ziva after she supposedly killed one of his teammates (the story essentially combined the Dakiti and Nexus we know today). When I started writing Ziva vs. Dakiti, he was sort of a loner who'd had everything taken from him and wanted desperately to get in on the action in order to exact his revenge on the people who had hurt him. He was also sort of Ziva's secret admirer. I thought I liked all of this, but after I got a little way into the plot, I felt like there was something missing. The element of his brother's death was there, but it seemed pointless at the time. I rewrote the beginning from his perspective, but that still didn't help. It was like I had jumped in too fast and hadn't taken the time to establish his relationships with the rest of the characters. There was a lot of telling and not enough showing.
I don't remember when I actually came up with the idea of having Ziva be the one who'd killed Soren, but I took that and ran with it. I went back and started the entire story from scratch, still using Aroska's perspective in the beginning (and that's what we see in Dakiti today). I like it a lot better because it takes more time to introduce him as a character and define his relationship with Ziva and the others. And that relationship has ended up being MUCH more pivotal than I had ever planned. I honestly hadn't meant to use him again after Dakiti, except for maybe a couple of minor cameo roles here and there, but I ended up liking him so much that I decided to keep him around.
MOVING FORWARD
I finished Ziva vs. Dakiti in the fall of 2010 and immediately jumped into the story that would become Nexus, which, in sticking to my “Ziva vs. [antagonist]” naming convention, was known as Ziva vs. Dasaro at the time. It took me 2 1/2 years to write; not only was it significantly longer than its predecessor, but I took a couple of really long breaks in the middle of it. I finally finished it sometime in 2013. I have a memory of sitting in a college class during spring term of 2013 pretending to take notes when I was really brainstorming for the third installment, which I was calling Ziva vs. Ronan.
People had asked me on a number of occasions if I was ever going to publish any of my work. At that point, I could count the number of people who’d read my stuff on one hand. I was petrified by the prospect of sharing my stories with anyone. It’s kind of funny, because looking back now, I’m not sure WHY. But my aunt had self-published a number of books, so I knew that was a possibility if I ever wanted to actually pursue it. The farther I got into outlining Ziva vs. Ronan, the more I started thinking about all the time and energy I’d poured into these stories and these characters, and I had nothing to show for it.
I think it was like February 2014 when I actually had a true “What if I did that?” thought regarding publishing. The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That March, I made the decision: I was going to share my work with the world.
TAKING THE LEAP
I was still scared out of my mind, but a little of the apprehension started to turn into excitement. I’d had a rule for myself that I wasn’t allowed to mess with stories anymore once they were finished, and since publication was going to require extensive revisions of both of my completed books, it was almost liberating. When I first started writing Ziva & Co., the story was just supposed to be about them and their adventures, and as much as I loved Aroska, I felt kind of guilty about putting so much of the focus on him when he hadn’t been designed to be a primary character. Revising meant I could shift things around a bit and tell the story I now truly wanted to tell: one about him and Ziva. Skeet and Zinni would still play pivotal roles of course, but the focus would be on Ariva™, their conflict, and how they navigated through all these challenges together despite everything.
I spent two months revising Dakiti and self-published the ebook at the end of May 2014. I never had any desire to pursue an agent or actual publishing deal; self-pubbing seemed like the most convenient way to share my work with people and control how it was done (check out my recent piece on why self-publishing has been great). The paperback came shortly after in mid-June. The book got off to kind of a rocky start, at least in my opinion; I hadn’t taken the time to network or build any sort of platform beforehand, and I got excited and rushed the whole publication process more than I should have. Of course, that’s all been part of the learning process, and luckily self-publishing means it’s easy to fix mistakes. But there are definitely things I would do differently if I could go back in time.
Rather than dive straight into revisions for the sequel, I took a little time that summer to start writing Ronan, since I already had a pretty extensive outline. That fall, I began editing Ziva vs. Dasaro, which I named Nexus after searching for words related to connections (since the story involves a connection between seemingly unrelated events/issues). Nexus released December 1, 2014, almost exactly six months after Dakiti.
I dove back into the Ronan draft in January 2015, and, with the exception of the maybe 20,000 words I’d written the previous summer, hammered out that entire 153,000-word monster in six months and completed it in June. I took the rest of the summer off after graduating from college so I could prep the book for publication. It released September 1, 2015. I actually have another old blog post (“How Does Your Brain Work?”) that details how a couple of scenes we know from Ronan were not only in my head but actually written even before Dakiti’s publication.
Finding balance
And then I got a job, which put a major damper on my focus and writing. Suddenly I had very little spare time, and I had a million things I wanted to fit into that spare time. On the bright side, I had a number of coworkers find out about my work, express interest, and even buy and read my books, so that was cool. Even now, eight years later, the CFO—who owns signed copies of all my books and confessed to me once that Ziva has showed up in her dreams—will introduce me to people as “our resident author.” It’s been nice to have that support.
Meanwhile, I went ahead and published The Ziva Payvan Collection, an ebook-exclusive box set that includes the whole trilogy plus some bonus materials.
I knew I wanted to continue the series, despite the fact that Ronan’s ending was designed to be a definite finale. The idea I had was guaranteed to be way too long for a single book, so I decided to split it into two parts. I was calling the first part Embers, thinking of it as being the aftermath of the main trilogy, and the second part was still unnamed. But one day, I was participating in one of the weekly writing games on Twitter, and I posted this snippet from the draft:
It suddenly struck me that Fracture would make a much better title for part 1, and that Embers could still serve as the title of part 2. Despite this revelation, however, I made two critical mistakes; the first was thinking surely I could write this story without any sort of outline, since it had been in my head for so long, and the second was thinking I should try to write the two parts in tandem.
After spending a solid two years (no joke) floundering around, I finally forced myself to set Embers aside and focus solely on Fracture, even going so far as to start from the beginning and create a thorough outline. It came along fairly easily since I did honestly have a lot of the story in my head. It took another couple of years to clean up the mess I’d made—during which time I also redid all my existing cover art and moved my books to wide distribution—and I continued making a few notes in the Embers draft since it was all one story and continuity details would be important. I finally published Fracture on October 28, 2019. Originally, only two years were supposed to have passed between the main trilogy and the Legacy books, but I changed it to four years to better fit the real-life timeline.
I took a little bit of a break and then dove back into Embers. I already had quite a bit written, but I spent another two years on it because it was the culmination of literally everything that had happened throughout the rest of the series and I wanted to treat it with the utmost care. It was actually pretty emotionally exhausting and I was kind of a wreck in the week or so leading up to publication. I was thrilled to be able to release it—part 2—on February 22, 2022 (aka 2/22/22), which was also a (Two)sday. It was my most successful release ever, and the response from readers has been overwhelmingly positive. I’m so dang proud of that book.
The current state of things
Up until the Embers release, all my books had only been available in ebook and paperback formats, so later that summer, I began working on releasing them in hardcover. That was SUCH a fun project. I knew I wanted to do kind of an alternate, special edition look while still keeping the color schemes and design elements consistent. I started with just the main trilogy and released the hardcovers about a year ago, and I’m still so pleased with how they turned out. Fracture and Embers came a bit later in January of this year, and they also look fantastic.
My current project is audiobooks. I’ve been asked a number of times over the years whether my work would ever be available in audio, and I finally took the plunge this summer. I’m so excited to finally be offering my books in this medium. Dakiti’s production is finished and is currently in the revision stage. I anticipate it will be ready before the end of the month, and the other books will gradually follow.
Meanwhile, I have FIVE writing projects swirling around in my head right now, which is unfortunately causing kind of a stalemate. I’m planning on most or all of my future work taking place in this same galaxy I’ve created; I figure it’s a big place, so why not make use of it? These projects are:
A full-length novel starring a Durutian bounty hunter who ends up stranded on a backwater penal colony planet—she’s also related to another Durutian character we met in the main series
A trilogy of (or maybe even four or five) shorter novellas that tell one overarching story but each focus more on a particular character; I had this crazy thought that Adin should be the lead in the first installment (we’ll see lots of other familiar faces in this story as well)
A prequel short story (or novella if it gets out of control) starring Emeri
The short story starring Kat Reilly I said I’d write years ago
A short story starring Ken Oda that occurs between the events of Ronan and Fracture
I’m really excited to work on all of these, assuming I can ever break out of this paralyzing gridlock.
That pretty much brings us up to speed!
Despite once being terrified by the thought of publishing, it has been an absolute honor and privilege to share my stories and characters with everyone over the years. I still don’t have an overly huge audience, but it’s been so fun to connect with readers and other writers around the globe and force other people to deal with all the shenanigans going on inside my head.
This was a long post, and I still only briefly touched on so many things, so if anyone ever has any questions—whether you’re a prospective new reader or a Ziva Payvan series veteran—I’d be more than happy to answer them and chat more with you.
Remember, there are also tons of resources here on my site, including a glossary, a full-size galaxy-map, concept art, and more!
