The Creator and the Nebula

Writing the CEO and Bubbles/Niamh

23 August 2026 ~ 3 min read

How do you write a character who Created Everything Originally and keep her interesting?

That was the problem with the CEO from the beginning.

A being who made the cosmos is, by definition, unknowable — and unknowable characters are boring on the page. The solution was to make her unpredictable. You never know when the CEO will appear, and when she does, she can be anyone. Amelia Earhart in a leather jacket, charting impossible territories. Marie Curie with hands faintly glowing green, carrying the cost of knowledge in the circles under her eyes. Grace O’Malley, the Irish Pirate Queen, with a cutlass that shimmers between steel and starlight. A battlefield medic making triage decisions. Ada Lovelace with mathematical equations spiraling from her fingers. A courthouse clerk with too many pens.

Each guise reflects the moment. When the situation calls for strategy, she’s Sun Tzu. When it demands endurance, she’s Marina Abramović. When the cosmic symphony needs conducting, she cycles through Hildegard von Bingen, Leonard Bernstein, and Gustavo Dudamel. The CEO isn’t playing dress-up — she’s revealing which facet of creation the moment requires. That’s how I kept her human-scaled: not by shrinking her, but by showing her one face at a time, each one drawn from a real person who embodied something extraordinary within very human limits.

Bubbles is the opposite problem. Where the CEO is infinite and must be made specific, Bubbles is specific and must be made infinite.

She begins as a sentient nebula—a being of pure cosmic energy who learned human form by studying Renaissance masters. She serves as the Administrator of Universal Aesthetics, which sounds grand until you realize it mostly involves arguing with celestial bureaucrats about whether Saturn’s rings need re-tilting. When she visits Earth, she chooses the name Niamh (Irish for “radiant”) and immediately begins getting human expressions magnificently wrong. She is adorable, earnest, and completely incapable of hiding what she feels.

What makes Bubbles/Niamh the emotional heart of The Cosmic Janitor Trilogy is her transformation. Across three books, she moves from cosmic being to something more vulnerable and more powerful: a person. She develops human qualities — loyalty, doubt, humor, heartbreak—and each one makes her more susceptible to the thing she’s studying: human creativity. The more human she becomes, the more she risks. And the more she risks, the harder you root for her.

The CEO shows you every face of creation. Bubbles shows you one face — hers — and lets you watch it become real. Between them, they carry the Trilogy’s deepest question: what does it mean to be made, and what does it mean to choose to become? I’ll say this much about where Bubbles came from: she’s inspired by someone real, someone whose warmth and reliability I wanted to put at the center of the cosmos. Who that person is, I’ll keep to myself. Some stolen details are too precious to name.

~ Liam