Where the Idea for Shuttlers Came From

by | Jun 21, 2026 | Behind the Books | 1 comment

People assume that if you’ve written a space opera novel about beings who can slip between alternate realities, you must have had it all plotted out in advance. A nice, neat outline. Maybe even a spreadsheet.

I did not have a spreadsheet. I didn’t even have a plot arc.

As regular readers will know by now, I’m a Pantser — a Discovery Writer, if we’re being polite about it. Give me a word, a sentence, a stray image, and I’ll find out what happens by writing it. Shuttlers was no exception. In fact, it might be the best example I have of just how far that approach can take you if you let it.

It All Started with a Phrase

The seed of the whole thing was a phrase: “What the Dickens?”

This led me to an unscrupulous scholar examining a strange object he had bought, scalping the seller. This, in turn, directed me to a young man called Justin Wilson, caught smuggling forbidden books from one version of Earth into another. That was it. That was how it started. A scholar. A smuggler. Forbidden books. Somewhere that isn’t quite our world but resembles it enough to be familiar, with some interesting quirks.

I had no idea, when I started, that Justin would turn out to be a shuttler himself — one of a rare breed who can move between realities almost as easily as walking through a door. In fact, I didn’t even know what shuttlers were until Justin used his ability to evade arrest by the local police.

I had no conception there’d be a multiverse full of alternate Earths being raided, plundered, and occasionally destroyed by people exactly like him. I certainly had no idea there’d be an organisation called the Sidewise Directorate, set up specifically to stop all that from happening, or that one of its patrolmen — Pol Atkinson — would end up arresting Justin. Nor did I know that Justin, Pol, and the policeman who first tried to arrest him would all end up working together to thwart a conspiracy to take control of all realities, everywhere.

All of that arrived the way it always does for me: one sentence at a time, with the tale telling me what it was about rather than the other way round.

From 400 Words to a Full-Length Novel

Most of what I write starts life as a short story, or at least the beginnings thereof — four or five hundred words, written in twenty minutes flat while the Muse has hold of me. Shuttlers didn’t stay that size for long. The world kept needing more of itself. More rules about how the shuttling worked. More about why the Directorate existed and who was really pulling its strings. More about what Justin stood to lose if he got this wrong.

I was so fascinated by the concept of the shuttlers that I began writing a second story about them, which eventually became the chapter “Rogues” in the book. Once I’d finished, there they remained for a couple of months as part of the second volume of the Paranormal City series: Tales From the Underbelly.

My writing coach, Annalisa, whom I have mentioned before, organises writers’ retreats in England most years. I took part in half a dozen of them, and during the very first one, we talked about publication in a one-on-one session. My first book, Paranormal City, wasn’t landing with publishers.

My Muse is genre-fluid. Read that again; it didn’t say what you think it said! She doesn't care about genres and their perceived boundaries. As a result, the book combined dark urban fantasy, science fiction and horror, with a touch of humour now and again. Publishers like to pigeonhole their books and get antsy when they can’t.

Annalisa suggested that I take the time to expand the two stories about the shuttlers into a full-blown science fiction novel. As the structure of the two stories made them connected but not exactly consecutive, since there is about a year between them, I decided that the rest of the book should also be in a similar format: an episodic novel with an overall story arc.

Before I knew it, I wasn’t writing short stories anymore. I was writing my first full-length novel, and the Multiverse had quietly become enormous on me without asking permission.

The Hard Parts Weren’t the Ideas

If I’m honest, the ideas were the easy bits. Ideas always are, for me — they turn up uninvited at all hours, and I’ve learned not to argue with them. The hard part was the part that comes after: read, revise, edit, wash, rinse, repeat. And repeat. And repeat… Turning a sprawling, pantser-built multiverse into something that actually made sense to a reader who hadn’t been living inside my head while I wrote it.

That’s where the real work happened. Plenty of it, more than I’d like to admit to.

However, when it came to going over it with Annalisa, a funny thing happened. All the skills I’d learned while editing Paranormal City stood me in good stead. It turned out that I didn’t need that much help from her because I had already done most of what was necessary. It was mainly about adding foreshadowing, linking back to previous events (which is always important in YA novels), and removing all my “Britishisms”. It turned into a YA novel after an agent suggested I make the protagonist younger to appeal to readers in their early to mid-teens.

Moreover, Annalisa suggested that I needed a segue between the stories “Vertex” and “Directorate Investigator” to show how the organisation dealt with real aliens, i.e., non-human ones. I put together a story in the two days between our editing sessions, using a completely different style, and called it “Monster Mashup”.

Where It Ended Up

Shuttlers went on to be traditionally published by an indie company and — rather to my astonishment — picked up a joint award from the Writers Forum in 2023, alongside Paranormal City. I’ll be honest, when I started writing about a book-smuggling shuttler with no plan beyond “see what happens,” an award was not on my list of expectations.

And now there’s a sequel coming: Shuttlers II: O.R.C.A. Shuttlers and the organisations monitoring them aren’t done with me yet, and I suspect the Multiverse has rather more in store than either of us originally bargained for. Although the second volume is set far in the future, Justin and Pol still get a look in.

Mind you, that’s rather the point of being a Pantser. I never know what I’m writing until I’ve written it — I just have to trust that the story knows where it’s going, even when I very much don’t.

If you want to read the book, click on the image below.

No related posts.

1 Comment

  1. Cathy Cade
    Cathy Cade on June 21, 2026 at 4:56 pm

    Ah – the Writers Forum. i still think it was a better mag than the one I now subscribe to since Writer’s Forum closed.
    But that’s progress (???)
    Good luck with the follow-up.

    Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Powered by
►
Necessary cookies enable essential site features like secure log-ins and consent preference adjustments. They do not store personal data.
None
►
Functional cookies support features like content sharing on social media, collecting feedback, and enabling third-party tools.
None
►
Analytical cookies track visitor interactions, providing insights on metrics like visitor count, bounce rate, and traffic sources.
None
►
Advertisement cookies deliver personalized ads based on your previous visits and analyze the effectiveness of ad campaigns.
None
Powered by

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This