Letters to the Editor: The Introduction
A behind-the-scenes conversation between author and editor, unpacking the opening pages of Lord of Water — Book I.
Editor: Before we talk about craft or keywords or any of the mechanics of publishing, I want to ask the obvious question. Why open the whole trilogy with an Introduction that promises the reader feelings rather than plot? "You will feel the ocean spray on your face." "You will hold your breath." Not "here is what happens" — here is what you'll feel.
Author: When the novel came to me, I could feel the salt air on my face. I could see and feel the swells of the ocean and the day-to-day adventure that could lead anywhere — and I had not even written the first word yet.
Editor: That reframes the entire Introduction for me. It isn't a synopsis dressed up in second person. It's the closest you could get to handing someone else what already existed in you before a single word was down. Most writers build the sensory world in afterward, as description layered on top of plot. It sounds like for you it happened in reverse — the feeling arrived whole, and the plot had to be discovered inside it.
Author: I have a certainty in my immortality, and despite this journey only being a small glimpse of one lifetime in one adventure, each day captures the moment and spirit of what it is to be alive. On my last day in this mortal body, it will be those special moments I look back upon. They're not recorded in a brain, or something mechanical to a physical body — they're immortal moments. They become part of our immortal character.
Editor: That's the parable underneath the parable. Shane's thousand lives aren't really the point — the point is that this is true for everyone, and the trilogy is a vehicle to let a reader feel it rather than be told it. It reframes a line I'd read too quickly the first time through: "He has lived a thousand lives. In each one, the same ancient purpose calls him back." I read that as world-building — the mechanics of reincarnation. But the immortal moments are the actual unit of the story, not the immortal lifetimes. The plot is the container. The moments are the cargo.
And it lines up exactly with the Introduction's actual promises. Not one of them is an outcome. Every single one is a moment: the spray on your face, the held breath, falling in love with the people who join his journey.
Author: The challenges I face day to day with my development company, and in life generally, have comparable magnitudes to this. If I do well, I have more power to bring forward and do more with. The failures give me two options — I either consider the loss a loss, or I see it as a lesson I can turn into firm personal policy against any similar problem in the future. Writing a fictional character going through his own trials gives me, and I hope my readers, a joyful moment on the journey we're all on. It puts everything into perspective.
Editor: That's a very practical, almost engineering way of describing character-building as immortal currency — which is not what most readers expect walking into a spiritual sci-fi series. It's not abstract cosmology. It's a working operating system for how you handle a bad week, handed to a protagonist who happens to be saving water planets instead of shipping software.
Which brings me to the question I couldn't let go of: does Shane ever get it wrong? Does he treat a setback as pure loss before converting it — or is the struggle always external?
Author: Shane definitely hits a failure at the end of this journey — otherwise there'd be no Book II. But he takes it and enthusiastically turns it into the next journey. It was never meant to be easy. Saving planets and civilisations isn't an easy task. There's also a lesson he learns — his complacency is what leads him into this crisis in the first place. He spots this, and there's a shift in his attitude toward confronting the greater problem of losing the planet. But for him, winning is not an option. There is no choice in the matter. He never loses his certainty — he only changes his strategy. The planet and its civilisation will be saved and continue. He never allows his certainty to drop. Never.
Editor: That's a sharper mechanism than "he fails and tries again," and it changes what the antagonist of Book I actually is. Complacency is the real threat before Slab ever shows up — the loafing, the "this next year I am going to be fully chilling," the near-miss on the calibration deadline. Slab isn't the cause of the crisis. He's what complacency let in. The danger was earned, not just imposed on Shane from outside.
And it's a genuinely unusual thing to do with a protagonist — removing the most common engine of tension (will he succeed?) and replacing it with a different one (what will it cost him to change course in time?). Shane doesn't wonder if the planet can be saved. That's settled. What he re-examines is only ever the how.
A failure, in this worldview, never gets to cast a deciding vote on the outcome. It's not a referendum on whether you'll get there — it's just information about which policy to run next time.
Lord of Water is a spiritual sci-fi series about a man who has lived a thousand lives, each one spent protecting the rarest resource in the universe — water planets — and who never lets a setback change his certainty, only his strategy.
Read the Introduction and Chapter 1 free at lordofwater.com
© Mike King, 2026. Turquoise Era Publishing.