THE QUICK PITCH

If Top Gun and Star Wars had a baby it would be Battle Flag. It’s a high flying space opera series that I can, hopefully and eventually, share with many other authors to build the world.

NEED MORE?

The Road To Hell is meant to be the first book in the Battle Flag series. It covers the opening moves and the first major battle of, what will become, a decades long war between the Terran Consortium and the Jorian Coalition.

The main focus of the story is on Lieutenant Commander Michael "Ironhand" Jovanne and his longtime friend and squadron mate Miguel "Roach" Ortiz. It follows the two of them as they fly missions for the Consortium Star Force and generally irritate their Admiral. They’re a couple of fun loving guys who are also quite skilled fighter pilots.

But the story also spins out to cover other characters, such as Jorian Vice President Krias Rigan who orchestrates the start of the war and Cofi Dom Oso who is a mafia kingpin(in title only) who uses the first attacks to consolidate power and bring unity to his outlaw country on the fringes of the galaxy.

My hope, with the Battle Flag series, is to spin out a shared universe series of novels similar to the Star Trek series but with fewer restrictions on contributing authors. The idea being that each book doesn’t necessarily follow Jovanne but other stories could feature other ships and crews. They can be as comical or as serious as an author wishes to make them. I even have plans for implementing non-canon stories so that major characters can be killed off and alternate histories can be spun out from that. I feel that Inkshares is the perfect place for this series because it would give the readers a chance to have some control and a say in what happens to this world.

THE ORIGIN OF THIS STORY

I grew up playing video games, from the Atari 2600 up through Xbox 360 and PC, and one game series that stuck with me the most was Wing Commander. In High School I started writing my own stories and thought it would be really cool if somebody wrote Wing Commander novels or made a movie based on the games, little did I know there were WC novels out back then.

I was also reading Tom Clancy and Stephen Coonts novels at this time and I really wanted write something in that vein. A geopolitical military action adventure but, unfortunately, I realized I didn’t know enough about the military to write a plausible techno-thriller. Then the bright idea hit me, make it sci-fi then you can just make your own rules. Alas, that didn’t really work either, so I spent a lot of time developing the history and lore of the Battle Flag world while researching the more technical stuff I needed to create a plausible military environment.

Once I had that I set to work crafting this story in a way that, hopefully, captures the thrill of dogfighting in Top Gun or the rush of a bombing run, ala Flight of the Intruder.

Thanks for checking out my project!