// 2025-11-22 // by Neon
For the last six years I’ve been working on a sci-fi novel called The Zeta Directive. It’s a book about a secret alien shadow government that rules the world. I’m still actively working on it, but unfortunately it’s not done yet. I don’t know when it will be finished.
The thing that they don’t tell you when you jump into writing a novel in your spare time is that as you grow and change as a person, your relationship with your writing changes. In this post, I want to take some time and reflect on what I’ve learned six years into the project.
Maybe you’ll find some of these musings useful, but ultimately this post is just a ramble in which I discuss experiences that I found interesting or unexpected.
For a post that’s more directly focused on writing advice, consider checking out my article about Seven Rules for Sci-Fi Writers. I still consider those rules to be my gold standard, even six years into my current mess.
When I started writing the Zeta Directive, it was only meant to be a short couple stories to share with a frient of mine who I have unfortunately since had a falling out with. I never expected the first few chapters to turn into a stubborn and endlessly long journey to write a novel.
In 2019, I penned the very first chapter of Zeta Directive. I was still near the start of my career, fairly fresh out of university and working a trades job as a cable technician for a certain well-known telecom conglomerate that I won’t name. Despite my lifelong passion for technology, I hadn’t really built a career yet. I was still young and bright eyed, not knowing what was to come.
The Zeta Directive was a cool idea for me because it was a challenge for me to try to write a story set in the present and make use of current events to make my story feel more alive. The idea was that after getting through the basic exposition to introduce the characters, I could have an ongoing web serial that reference ongoing real-world current events and jokingly turn it all into alien conspiracies.
I write so much futuristic science fiction that I thought it would be a real change of pace–and make things more grounded in reality–to be set in the present day.
As a sort of premonition for how far off the rails the process of writing my novel would go, it’s incredibly funny to me that nearly immediately the real world torpedoed my plans for The Zeta Directive.
When I started writing, COVID hadn’t happened yet. It would only be several months until all of a sudden we’re all hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitiser. Given that I had no desire to write about a pandemic, my plans for a recurrent web serial were completely dead from the onset.
The climate in which I started my novel pretty much immediately altered the trajectory of The Zeta Directive into being an alternate-future YA scifi novel with zero references to any current events.
Anyway, fast forward six years later, the world is completely unrecognisable from how it was when I started writing. The political, economic, and social landscape of our lives have changed. I myself have changed.
Nowadays, I’m very secure in my career as a cybersecurity professional and I’ve been a part of the workforce for almost a decade since I graduated university. I’m much more of a “real adult” (if such a thing even truly exists) than I was when I started writing The Zeta Directive. As such, my relationship with the novel, its characters, its story, and how I write it has changed a lot.
So, funny enough, when I started writing The Zeta Directive, I wasn’t particularly politically informed or in-the-loop on politics or current events almost at all. I would attribute The Zeta Directive to being one of the major influences that changed this aspect of my life.
If you’re not familiar, The Zeta Directive is an incredibly political story that focuses on the events and actions that result from the interactions of several state-level actors with the central conceit of the Earth’s major governments being run by a secret alien illuminati.
As I discussed a bit prior, the central premise was always going to be “what if all the funniest scifi-esque conspiracy theories were actually real?”. It started off as a joke concept where the humour arose from the discrepancy between the inherent ridiculousness of the concept versus the deadpan serious way I chose to write about it. And, I chose to write about a main character who knows nothing about all of this crazy stuff but gets wrapped up in it, forced to learn about how ridiculous it all is.
Honestly? Pretty great concept if you ask me, even aside from the fact that the project has gone in a completely different direction since its inception.
Given that the story is written in a way that takes itself quite seriously, I ended up getting pretty invested in trying to make it “realistic” (or at least as realistic as you can plausibly make the concept of an alien illuminati that secretly runs the world).
I started going down rabbit holes and doing all kinds of various research about how the levers of governments worldwide actually function, how international relations are conducted, how economics and politics influence international relations, and all manner of other esoteric political and philosophical concepts.
What I ended up learning about myself is that I genuinely enjoy learning about the subject matter for its own sake. As I wrote more, I got more educated on political topics and refined my real-life worldview. I started talking to other people who have an interest in these kind of topics, and I even ended up making what are now some of my deepest friendships and connections from going down this rabbit hole.
That said, the more I came to knew about this crazy world that I live in, the more I came to realise how little I truly know and just how complex everything is. It got harder and harder to write as I got more educated on the subject matter because more and more often I’d get caught up on thoughts of “would that really happen that way?” or “is that really how that works? I don’t think that’s realistic.”
I started stumbling over my own canon as well, running into hurdles from earlier chapters and stepping on landmines I had set up for myself, not realising the narrative dead ends that I had slowly written myself into.
The thing that’s nice about short stories is that you can just come up with a concept, bash the whole thing out, clean it up a bit, and then you’re done. It’s clean. It’s simple. You don’t have a canon to maintain.
But, the longer a story gets, the more bits and pieces stack on top of each other in order to maintain continuity. You have to actually remember the implications of stuff that you said in earlier chapters, as well as factor those implications into what happens later on.
Sci-fi is particularly brutal when it comes to canon consistency because the core genre conceit is making lots of shit up. Fake technology, fake politics, fake social movements, you name it. One can come up with ideas that might work for a chapter or two, but it’s easy for one’s decisions to have knock-on effects that make plot holes unavoidable in a longer story.
The more you write, the more canon you become beholden to. After the first twelve chapters, I hit a sort of wall where I really started floundering for a couple years. I kept trying to write new chapters got caught up in the fact that they didn’t feel like they meshed with the previously established canon.
I spent so much time thinking about what is or isn’t realistic, the implications of technologies I had established to exist in canon, and the consistency of my characters’ actions. Eventually, I really had to take a step back and reconcile it all.
I used to post these serially and write chapter to chapter. I don’t do that anymore. I’m still working on the project, but nowadays it’s written in a private git repo which I intend to compile into a finished work when it’s done. Half the time I spend working on The Zeta Directive, I’m just writing out setting notes or fleshing out details that are important to keep consistent but hard to track.
It is interesting to note that while reconciling plot holes or other inconsistencies usually isn’t hard in a narrative sense, it can be very awkward for one’s worldbuilding. As a sci-fi writer, I’ve found that most of my plot holes generally tend to stem back to some technology or concept that I explained in a single paragaph or two. Usually, it’s quite easy to go back and just change a few lines and boom, plot hole fixed.
The problem is that–more often than not–what’s only a few sentences worth of changes can have huge implications for the imaginary science or political systems within a fictional universe. A tiny narrative retcon can easily turn into a massive conflict in the laws that govern how one’s universe works. Yet, being able to make such wide-reaching universal changes with just a couple keystrokes is way too useful to pass up when writing a sci-fi novel.
I just couldn’t keep writing chapter to chapter because I was hamstringing myself too much being beholden to concepts I wrote about in previous chapters. So, I changed my workflow. Now, I write random chapters completely out of order and retcon to my heart’s desire. When I write, I can ignore everything but the most major of plot holes. It doesn’t really matter if I contradict myself one way or another as long as I can go clean that shit up in post. I make little notes to myself whenever I retcon something in a previous chapter to remind myself to go and fix it later.
Perhaps this struggle is why there are so few successful long-running web serials when you compare to how many successful novels there are. But that’s okay. It’s okay to start a project, learn a lot while you’re working on it, and change how you do things based on what you’ve learned. Being able to recognise when your existing process isn’t working for you anymore is a crucial part of keeping momentum on a long running project like a novel.
Another funny thing that happens over the course of six years is that you forget a lot. You even forget a lot of stuff that you think is pretty important. And let me tell you, over time I’ve forgotten a lot.
Several years ago, I made an outline where I went point by point plotting out each of the key events that happens to get to the end of the story. I want to say I made my outline sometime around 2022, but it’s before I started using version control for my manuscript so I honestly don’t know when. So, even though some of the key details have changed, I’ve actually known how The Zeta Directive is going to end since around 2022.
However, a year or so after I wrote my outline I started getting myself into trouble when I’d write new chapters based on bullet points loosely remembered from my outline. I’d go back and re-read my outline only to realise that the way I had originally sequenced events (and subsequently forgotten about) was a lot better than the chapter that I actually ended up writing.
This happened to me at least twice before I resigned myself to always double checking my outline and using it as a north star to guide me before sitting down to write a chapter that I most definitely didn’t totally forget key details about.
I’m the kind of writer who finds worldbuilding important. But one of the most bittersweet conundrums of good worldbuilding is that you can’t just dump it on people. Quite the opposite, most of what you worldbuild about is stuff you should never tell the readers about. If you only give your readers little crumbs of setting details at a time, you can pull off a magic trick where your world feels incredibly deep and polished because it’s impossible for the reader to tell what you intentionally left mysterious versus what you genuinely never thought about or overlooked.
However, even if you’re not going to tell the reader most of the stuff that you came up with, it’s still important that you can keep track of it so that you can stay consistent. This is where a setting bible is absolutely critical for any setting with lots of moving parts. Just like how it’s easy to forget what’s in the plot, it’s even easier to forget small details of how one’s world works if one doesn’t meticulously write things down.
A setting bible is just a series of notes and excerpts that one can write for onerself to explain the in-universe mechanics important technologies or to catalogue important cultural/historical details that shape the reality the characters find themselves in. For the purpose of The Zeta Directive, I believe I’ve spent nearly as much time writing snippets for my setting bible as I have spent writing new chapters.
Writing down setting details as internal articles can be incredibly cool and rewarding, but it can also be a huge letdown because it’s work that is quite literally invisible and will never be directly appreciated by readers. Some of my favourite little details about The Zeta Directive are excerpts that exclusively live as part of my setting bible and will likely never see the light of day. I can’t help but feel like this is a huge shame sometimes, even though I rationally know that sharing my setting bible excerpts directly would ruin the magic of letting the characters (and by proxy the reader) speculate about this stuff.
The first image containing AI-generated artwork that I posted as part of The Zeta Directive was in Section 5, on 16 February 2020.
This was almost three years before ChatGPT was released, much less the release of more modern image diffusion models. The reason I bring this up isn’t so much to brag about being a truly early adopter, but rather because I want to reflect on what it has felt like to watch this new artistic medium rapidly emerge.
When I started using AI tools as part of my toolkit for illustration, I thought it was the coolest thing ever, and so did most people who interacted with my work. The fact that I could use a computer to generate unique custom graphics for my work as a writer was so empowering. It was like living in the future! There was a whole new realm of creativity that had been unearthed with the assets I could create, and the idea that this was somehow a bad thing was simply unthinkable.
Fast forward five years later, and the world has changed a lot. The tooling to generate AI artwork has now hit mass availability and AI slop (we even have a term for it now!!) is unavoidable. It has become so ubiquitous and so associated with low-quality and low-effort work that many people associate its aesthetic with low quality or shoddy workmanship.
The AI imagery present in some of The Zeta Directive illustrations that I was once incredibly proud of for being uniquely techie and ahead of their time unfortunately haven’t aged well. They get to look like shit by visual association with mass produced slop. These days, I don’t use AI-generation as the centrepiece of my work anymore because I’m a hipster and I don’t want my work to look like something mass-manufactured.
What’s even more interesting to me, however, is the mass political detractor movement around this technology. It feels like it suddenly just came out of nowhere, honestly. There are people who (I shit you not) once told me that the illustrations for my work were really cool who are now squarely in the “AI is evil and soulless” ideological camp.
I can’t help but often feel a bit of whiplash over the kinds of comments I see these days online disparaging the use of AI tools in creative work. What was once met with unanimous and wholesome optimism over the amazing evolution of technology now feels like a weird political battleground.
It really upsets me because creative spaces shouldn’t be so polarised over something as stupid as the tools people use to make their work. I don’t like being conspiratorial (ironic, given my novel is about conspiracies, right?), but it often feels like this this kind of controversy has been manufactured purely for the sake of getting normal creative people to hate and tear each other apart over stuff that doesn’t fucking matter in the grand scheme of life.
I think the most interesting (and somewhat existentially dreadful) experience I’ve had working on the Zeta Directive has been watching my relationship with the characters and their stories change in real time. See, one of the things about writing that sounds trite but is incredibly true is that you can’t write a story without putting a part of yourself into it. The stories we write are a reflection of our world and the way we perceive the people and the institutions around us.
When you start writing about any kind of character, you have to really step outside of yourself and step into someone else’s shoes and how they see the world. The thing is, the only perspective any of us have ever truly experienced in this life is our own.
You’ve never been anyone but yourself; the only way you can write about someone else’s thoughts and feelings is by making assumptions about what they might think or feel based on your understanding of that person’s lived experiences and personality. Thus it logically follows that the characters we write are inexorably linked to our own personal perceptions and lived experiences as we try to empathise with what our characters are thinking or feeling when we write about them.
While each and every one of us has only lived our own lives, we all grow and change as people as we age and experience more of what this life has to offer. The person who you’ll be five years from now, ten years from now– she’s not the same person as the you that’s sitting and experiencing this article right now.
But once you put words to paper, well that’s it. Those words won’t change and grow over time the way you will. They’re just words, after all. The you that remains in the form of your past writing is a snapshot of the person you were when you wrote those words.
You might be seeing where I’m going with this, but bear with me a moment as I say something really fucking obvious: it takes time to write a novel. Your manuscript doesn’t just poof into existence magically one day. You have to painstakingly write it, chapter by chapter. But when those chapters start being written over a period of years, you very quickly end up in a situation where the ‘you’ who birthed those first chapters of your novel is a very different person from the ‘you’ who’s now inherited the task of finishing that novel.
The feeling of having to work with and extend on things your past self wrote–and, often a very very different version of yourself–feels so incredibly bizarre that I find it near indescribable. My desire to convey how bizarre this feels is what compelled me to write this reflective post, actually.
It’s hard to describe the problem because it isn’t even that I’m a better writer than I was when I started and that my old work is bad. No– quite frankly, I often go back and read stuff I wrote years ago and think to myself “damn bitch you wrote this? this is actually pretty fire.”
But yet it really truly doesn’t feel like I’m one who wrote it. Needless to say, it becomes incredibly difficult to stay consistent with both the style and the vision that lady six years ago had for her story when she started it.
I don’t know how clear I’m being with the above explanation, so I’d like to present an example that’s really visceral to me. I’m gonna be honest and open up my heart a bit here, because I think it’s the only way to convey some of the emotions I feel about this conundrum (even if it’s a little embarassing for me).
When I started writing the Zeta Directive, my protagonist (River Mullins) was kind of a self insert character. As I first wrote her, River is kind of a naïve young woman who’s looking for her place in the world. She’s a college student who’s a bit lost in the world after getting pushed into studies that aren’t really her passion, so she gets into side projects and ends up in this online underworld of magical conspiracies where the world is so much bigger than she thought it would be.
She struggles with feeling like she’s not enough for her parents’ expectations, so she tells herself that she can do better and ends up in this crazy situation where she meets a beautiful woman of her dreams (Fiir sa Kalte) who she has amazing adventures with.
If you know anything about my life, you’ll know that those struggles I listed above are pretty much beat for beat things that I struggled with during earlier parts of my life. I didn’t really intend to be so on the nose making such a self insert, but it just kinda happened in a way that’s impossible to deny in hindsight. The River Mullins that I wrote about was sort of like a vision of if a cooler, prettier, and sassier version of me who got to actually break out of her everyday worries and self actualise as The Chosen One. It’s young adult coming of age and power fantasy story. Kind of generic, but that’s all good and well.
However, over the years as I built more and more onto this story… the goalposts shifted over time. The story got more complicated, I got better at understanding how the world works, I had ideas for the plot that got deeper and less generic. You can even start to see this process start to happen over the course of the chapters up on my website that you can read right now.
Let’s shift gears and talk about Fiir sa Kalte, a character who has grown into being the deuteragonist in The Zeta Directive.
When I originally wrote Fiir, she was intended to be both a plot device and a foil to River. The number one reason that she came to exist at all was very simple: When you have a protagonist who is (pardon my bluntness) kind of a useless idiot who knows fuck-all about what’s going on in a world of secret alien conspiracies, it really helps to have a character who’s actually tuned in to what the fuck is happening so that you can speed along your exposition.
But here’s the thing about Fiir: she needed a personality and backstory in order to be a compelling character. Well, fine, let’s make her a foil to River.
Instead of being naiive and bright-eyed, Fiir is contemplative and cynical. She’s a consummate professional who has been around the block a couple times and she’s not afraid to confidently flaunt that fact. While River has a whole life to yet build for herself, Fiir’s struggle is to maintain the life she has fought tooth and nail to build for herself under a regime that fucking hates her.
While River’s problems revolve more around her parents and her uncertain future as an adult who is just entering the ‘real world’, Fiir’s struggles are much more inward-facing. She has to ask herself how she feels about the person she’s become as her principles are tested. She has self-doubts about the choices and sacrifices she has made to be the person who she is today. She thinks to herself about how far she’s made it, but she’s terrified about the fact that now she’s the one that others look to for guidance when she certainly doesn’t know what the fuck she’s doing.
As a woman in my thirties with a solid career in a leadership role and a number of other struggles that I’ll avoid getting into, the character who I find myself relating to nowadays isn’t River. It’s Fiir¹.
As I write more and more chapters in The Zeta Directive, I’ve ended up writing a lot more from Fiir’s perspective than I ever expected to. She’s a fascinating and complex character whose story I’ve absolutely fallen in love with even though I originally intended her to be quickly discarded.
Hell, over the course of the last six years she has become my favourite fictional character that I’ve ever had the pleasure to write about. Never in a million years would I have expected my writing to go in that direction from the onset, yet here we are.
My point in discussing these two characters above is that I’m just no longer the kind of person who looks at a character like River and goes “ah yes, this angsty young collage student in her 20s… the perfect character to put front and centre as the protagonist of my novel”.
The key takeaway here from this entire ramble is that I’m simply not the version of myself who started writing The Zeta Directive, and I’ll never be that person again. I’m still me, yet I’m also not.
And that’s really weird. It feels weird to see yourself grow and change as a person. It feels weird to have your tastes change right in front of your own eyes. It feels surreal and existential, yet here I am.
Needless to say, while I hope that the Zeta Directive that will be complete and available for you to read one day, it won’t be quite the feel-good YA romp novel that it started its life as. And yet, that’s okay.
I can’t help but reflect on the nature of the limited time I have in this world and how I will continue to inevitably change as a person as my life marches on. If there’s one piece of advice that I could give as a takeaway to wrap this post up, it’s this:
If you have an idea for something artistic that you want to create, you need to start working on it now.
The art that you make now is a permanent record of the version of yourself who existed today for the version of yourself who will remain in the years to come. I think that’s kind of beautiful, if a bit terrifying to think about.
Footnote
¹Considering some of the supremely problematic things Fiir says and does, I would be remiss in professing my love for her character if I didn’t clarify that while I think she’s relatable, she’s not aspirational.
She’s awful, really, and that’s what makes her so special. In fact, my single favourite thing about writing her is exploring the disconnect between how incredibly alien her worldview is versus how deeply human her problems and her struggles in life are.