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I wrote years ago in Africa and UK, when you could still send typed manuscripts to publishers and get a polite refusal. Always a refusal, so I gave up.
They say nowadays it's worse. Publishers will never look at unsolicited manuscripts. Authors have to beg an agent to take them on. The agent must suck up to publishers. Then, after months or years something may be printed. However, begging to agents seemed no occupation for a gentleman. Neither did paying a snake oil salesman to vanity publish at my expense.
Then at last came the internet. I could write it, web it, and the world could read it. So that's what I did.
Lakes of Stars started as several bad short stories about the MOD. Then it occurred to me that the Falklands War had a good plot, with a beginning and an end. It was easier to write when I imagined a world where it happened on space ships instead of Navy ships. The Equator is the easiest place to launch into orbit, and I supposed that is where commerce and industry would concentrate in an interplanetary economy. I also wondered where a world railway system would have its main junction and thought of Jerusalem at the meeting of 3 continents, so I had the world capital there. And it seemed fun to have everything on Earth happening in the Rift Valley, just because not many scifi stories are set in Africa. (I was really proud to have thought of quantum entanglement giving instant communication across the galaxy, till I realised Philip Pullman had thought of it first.)