Introducing The Benign Incursion

The Premise So Far

Book Two of the Supreme Commander Laurie series finds Laurie plagued by endless administrative headaches in her first six months as supreme commander. In addition to resistance to her appointment throughout the United System Space Force bureaucracy, she’s being sued by Cassie Wolfduy, mother of the USSF airman Laurie had to kill in self-defense in Book One. She also finds herself politically stigmatized as a “Commerist” subservient to former supreme commander Jack Commer. But all these troubles pale in comparison to her scandalous attraction to Rod Morgan, the young physician/engineer on spaceship Pegasus I.

Meanwhile, Laurie’s protégé Captain Mavis Wheeler flies saucer Pegasus II to a planet 92.5 light-years away to help Jack’s son Jonathan James Commer deal with an alien race called the Counselors. The Counselors assist the races they encounter by creating a committee in the physical form of the new race. But Jonathan James is so inextricably linked with his Beagle Trotter that the Counselors assume they must be a single entity, and their resulting Committee of Six mistakenly takes on the permanent form of six-foot-tall combined Beagle-humans. When Jonathan James mentions that Sol may still be having trouble with the remnants of the Wounded, a deadly enemy hiding throughout the Orion Arm, the Counselors gladly use their long-range telekinetic powers to exterminate all nine thousand enemy operatives. But Captain Wheeler now understands that the giant benevolent Beagles can also wipe out Sol in a second if the United System fails to meet their increasingly strict requirements.

Draft 1 More or Less Finished

Draft 1A is 270 pages, 78,751 words, close to the length I’d originally envisioned for it. This is my twentieth novel. I’ll most likely take a break from it before polishing it to its final Draft 1B, which I feel will bring out the best sense of this first effort. Then Draft 2 will open the book to major restructuring; I already sense several areas that need work.

I’ve seen how important it is to give my new fiction project a title. A quick draft cover also helps.

Earlier parts of the novel now seem distant. “Who wrote this third chapter? I don’t remember it at all!” That’s both amusing and a sign of buried, unrefined energies. It’ll be interesting to see how this thing unfolds in a rereading. I also need to refresh myself on Book One, Supreme Commander Laurie, to make sure Book Two is congruent.

I can’t make a judgment yet on The Benign Incursion’s worth. Sometimes it feels sprawling and disconnected, other times I feel some interesting characters struggling for a voice. But it’s pleasing that the themes of the novel are aligning with where I’ve been the past couple years.

An odd spur to this novel dates from 1966. My 2023 post The Unknown Ending for The Martian Marauders explored my March 1966 notes for completing my unfinished eighth-grade draft of the foundational Jack Commer universe novel, The Martian Marauders, later rewritten and published in 2012. After the eighth grader’s last handwritten page 110, three notes glued to a sheet of notebook paper follow. But when I examined these notes in July 2023, the atrocious 1960s brown glue gave way on the right-hand note, and I saw a character name on the back, “Rod Morgan,” never used in the novel, no doubt intended as a heroic masculine character triumphing in the heroic masculine denouement of the novel. But now I knew I wanted to use Rod Morgan in a new Laurie novel. And I also realized that Laurie Lachrer, which began as a tossed-off name for what began as a minor character in The Martian Marauders, would sound much better as “Laurie Morgan.”