Twenty-five Glorious Years, by Ben Jeapes

Image by Dorothe from Pixabay 

It’s twenty five years (minus five days) since my first novel His Majesty’s Starship was published by Scholastic, so that’s been on my mind one way or another recently. I try to avoid using this space for crude self-promotion so I’ll talk about the authorial experience. Relevance will be shown, as they say in legal dramas.

It was exactly what I wanted; it was nothing like what I wanted; it certainly wasn’t what I expected, but I wouldn’t change a thing.

The strangest part of the whole business was that my agent managed to sell it to Scholastic. I had written what I thought was a properly grown-up bit of science fiction, complete with a divorced, depressed middle aged hero and an alien sex scene in chapter 16. Something that would be rubbing shoulders with The Expanse if it was published today. To this day I’m still not convinced he didn’t get two manuscripts mixed up, and sent Gollancz some kiddy piece. But so it was and so it went.

And as it turned out … Accidentally becoming a children’s author led to writing for Working Partners, which led to offers of ghostwriting work when my editor there changed jobs and inherited a series that needed a writer, which led to the breakthrough contract eight years ago that let me go freelance full time. I have no idea what would have happened if His Majesty’s Starship had been picked up by one of the big boys but it’s very unlikely I would be where I am now.

I supposed the moral is: hold onto your dreams, but only lightly because God might have a far better idea in mind.

While I’m here, one of the more bizarre outcomes was being contacted by a rabbi from New York, who had bought a copy at the WH Smith’s on Woking station, where of course all New York rabbis do their book-buying. He was intrigued by my use of things Israeli and Jewish in the novel, and did some web searching to see if I was Jewish myself. He managed to establish that a) I’m not but still b) we overlapped at school. In Dorset. Where all the New York rabbis go to school.

In particular, he called me out on the name of the Israeli ship in the novel – Adonai. And why not? I thought – it's a perfectly good Hebrew title. Except that, I'm told, no Israeli government would name a ship that. "Adonai" means "Lord" in Hebrew and is read instead of vocalising the Tetragrammaton (the four letters that correspond to YHWH) that make up the Ineffable Name of God. Orthodox Jews will not even say the word, outside of the context of reading liturgy and Torah, but say instead "HaShem" which means "The Name." If damaged, anything with the name of God on it may not be destroyed but must be buried in the ground in a designated "Geniza." So, you can see the problems of giving that particular name to a spaceship.

So now I know ...

Ben Jeapes took up writing in the mistaken belief that it would be easier than a real job (it isn’t). Hence, as well as being the author of eight novels and co-author of many more, he has also been a journal editor, book publisher, and technical writer. His most recent title is a children’s biography of Ada Lovelace. www.benjeapes.com