Tim Chawaga is a writer and playwright whose short fiction has been featured in Interzone and Escape Pod and whose work has been performed in New York and Philadelphia at many venues that have either closed or been converted into gyms. He has a BFA in Drama from the Tisch School of the Arts, is a 2019 graduate of Clarion West, and is the recipient of George R.R. Martin's Worldbuilder Scholarship. He works in tech and lives in a co-op in Brooklyn with his partner and dog.
In his debut novel, Salvagia, Triss Mackey is flying just under the radar, exploiting a government loophole that lets her live quietly aboard the Floating Ghost—her rented, sentient Cabana Boat. In exchange, she dives for recycling, recovered from the flooded area of formerly-coastal cities known as the yoreshore. If she happens to find some salvagia—nostalgic salvage, valued artifacts from the past—well, that’s just between her and the highest bidder.
But when the federal government begins withdrawing from Florida entirely, Triss must buy the Ghost outright or lose her loophole. Meanwhile, the corporate mafias are poised to seize power, especially Mourning in Miami, led by the legendary Edgar Ortiz, owner of the Astro America luxury hotel. Triss needs a score big enough to keep her free from both the feds and corporations, before the Ghost is sent to a watery, insurance-scamming grave.
In pursuit of such a score, she stumbles upon the chained up, drowned corpse of Ortiz, and winds up with more than she bargained for, including a partnership with Ortiz’s hotshot space-racing son, Riley. If she can help Riley solve the mystery of his father’s death, it may lead them to a valuable piece of salvagia and with it, the hope of a sustainable, free way of Florida living.
Tim stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about researching and writing the novel:
SALVAGIA is a science fiction mystery inspired by John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, about a freelance salvage diver living along the future flooded South Florida coast.
I would divide my research for it into two categories: structure and content.
STRUCTURE
SALVAGIA is a mystery novel, and it was mostly useful for me to try to adhere to some of the “rules” of a traditional mystery, or at least check in with them every now and again when I got stuck. So I read a lot, particularly the Travis McGee series, including his debut, The Deep Blue Goodbye. John D. MacDonald’s prose style is uniquely efficient. He can craft a whole character in a sentence, and his descriptions are beautifully specific while remaining unbelievably sparse.
I also consulted the somewhat famous but unsourceable 12-Chapter Murder Mystery structure just to get a general idea of what a satisfying mystery arc might look like.
At one point, my now-agent told me that things felt a little unfocused. The book was in first-person, but it’s science fiction, and that’s a particularly challenging combination; science fiction benefits from a lot of world-building description; how thing work and what their history is. First person limits the reader to what a single person in that world knows and experiences. But I thought that first-person was right for the mystery aspect of it, so the push and pull, of when to get in the world-building weeds (rarely) and when to stay on the plot tracks (usually) was something that I had to get a hold of. He recommended a few 1st person POV mysteries with female protagonists, like Charlaine Harris’ Shakespeare’s Landlord. After internalizing John D. MacDonald’s style and structure it was really useful to begin to look at other authors and how they approached questions like information delivery, twists, descriptions, and character backgrounds.
And then, at some point in my next draft, I just entirely forgot about any sort of structure and tried to make sure that I was still engaged upon re-read.
CONTENT
The benefit of science fiction is that I can often make up whatever I want, but the downside is that once I do, I really have to own it, and be willing to devote words to describing it in greater detail than existing things drawn from our collective knowledge. I was very conscious of this because of the push and pull of sci-fi vs. first-person I described above.
And there were a few things that I really wanted to devote a lot of attention to that were outside of my own personal experience. The first was the particulars of scuba diving. I am not scuba-certified myself, and am actually somewhat terrified of deep water. But my protagonist, Triss, dives a lot in the book, in some particularly claustrophobic places. The Last Dive by Bernie Chowdhury was an incredibly useful resource. It specifically outlines the dangers and thrills of shipwreck and cave diving, while telling a gripping non-fiction tale about father-son diving team the Rouses. The author is a diver himself, and that level of knowledge made this book an indispensable resource.
Further character inspiration work came from reading Driver #8, the autobiography of Dale Earnhardt Jr. There’s a sport in the book called atmo-breaking, which is basically a drag race to space. One of the characters, Riley Ortiz, is an atmo-breaker and the son of a famous atmo-breaker, so I thought that someone like Dale Earnhardt Jr. would be a good inspiration for what a person like that might be concerned about.
Lastly, SALVAGIA is a novel set in a climate-changed world, specifically the area around Miami. Out of all the many resources I drew inspiration from, including the work of futurist Kim Stanley Robinson, the book Disposable City by Mario Alejandro Ariza was most instrumental, because it outlined the threats to Miami specifically in the coming years—not just sea level rise but also the contamination of the aquifer, its history of unsustainable over-development, its urban planning policies and its politics.
You can learn more about Tim Chawaga and his writing by visiting his website, and follow him on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Goodreads. Salvagia is now available via all major booksellers.
