Behind the Scenes: Writing Chapter 1

Every story has a beginning. For Lord of Water, that beginning arrived not at a writing desk, but at the top of a 200-foot flagpole in Darling Harbour, Sydney.

I was working a job that had nothing to do with writing. Safety documents. Heights. The kind of work that keeps your hands busy and leaves your mind free to wander. And on that particular day, somewhere above the harbour, the entire story arrived at once.

Not a character. Not a scene. The whole thing — the water planets, the Lord of Water, the draw boats, the White Sapphire Crystal, the journey from Blue 3 to the highest point on earth. It landed fully formed, like a download from somewhere else entirely. I wrote what I could on the back of the safety documents I had with me. The rest I carried home.

The Challenge of Chapter One

Twenty years later, sitting down to write the actual opening chapter of Book One, I understood something I hadn't fully appreciated when the story first arrived: the beginning of an epic is the hardest thing to write.

You have to do so much at once. Introduce a world that is both alien and deeply familiar. Bring the reader close enough to a character that they'll follow him across a universe. Set a tone that can carry three books. And do it all without stopping the story dead with exposition.

Chapter One of Lord of Water opens on Blue 3 — a precious water planet on the far side of the universe from anything the reader might recognise. The Lord of Water has arrived to fulfil an ancient task: to calibrate the planet and protect her for another million years. What begins as a purposeful, almost routine arrival quickly reveals itself to be anything but.

I wanted the reader to feel the ocean before they understood it. To feel the weight and movement of the Hi-Sun as she rides the swells. To hear the creak of the draw boat's ancient timbers. To smell the salt. World-building, for me, has always been sensory first, explanatory second. If you can make a reader feel they are standing at the bow of a vessel on an alien sea, the rest of the world fills in naturally.

Writing Shane

The Lord of Water himself presented a particular challenge. He is ancient — an immortal guardian who has fulfilled this purpose across countless lifetimes. And yet the story required him to feel immediate, present, vulnerable. Ancient beings make for poor protagonists if their age makes them remote.

The solution was Mila and Gary. The crew of the Hi-Sun grounds the Lord of Water in relationship, in loyalty, in the small human (and not-so-human) moments that make a character someone the reader roots for. The Lord of Water may be the guardian of water planets, but he is also someone who depends on the people around him — and that dependency is where the story lives.

By the end of Chapter One, the dark forces that will drive the rest of Book One are already stirring in the deep. The longest day is approaching. What began as a familiar task is becoming something else entirely. That shift — from purposeful arrival to dawning threat — is the engine of everything that follows.

What I Hope You Feel

When I imagine the ideal reader finishing Chapter One, I hope they feel two things simultaneously: the vast scale of the universe the story inhabits, and the very intimate stakes of the relationships at its centre. Epic and personal, at the same time. That tension is what the Lord of Water trilogy is built on.

If you haven't read Chapter One yet, it's waiting for you. The ocean is ready. The Hi-Sun is at the bow. The longest day is coming.