Behind the Scenes

I guess it all started back in September 2019, when we were seeing a real acceleration of the anti-Trump sentiment in the media, especially here in Canada. I felt compelled to create a what-if story showing what could be if the Cabal got its way and Trump was out of the way. The story took some twists and turns as the swamp keeps getting drained, an ongoing mission as of this writing.
COVID came about in late 2019 and I wasn’t expecting the lockdowns and the mandates, nor did I expect the Cabal to steal the 2020 election.
I wound up including the dangerous aspects of the COVID vaccines and their DNA and RNA modifying technology into my Calamity scenario. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, try watching documentaries like ‘Died Suddenly’ to find out. All of it culminated into a major world building project that’s quite different from the one we live in.
The story was supposed to be a novella sized story which blossomed into a trilogy. However, I never looked into the word count of the stories and wound up breaking all three books in two. Too long!!! Books two and three had a natural cliffhanger in the middle, so the split was easy. Not so for book one. I had to add six new chapters to break it. The additions worked, and the story was more enriched for it.
So, then the series became six, but then I had another problem. I made the Clara character to be the villain and the foil to James, the hero, as I needed to keep the emperor and the empress in the background. You won’t see much of them, but you see a lot of Clara.
She wound up being so well received by my critique team I decided to do Clara adventures stories that act as prequels to the main series. I’ll get into Clara in another writing. So, then it got up to eight books. I wasn’t satisfied.
Although book eight was supposed to be the ending, there were too many loose threads and plots that needed to be finished, so I've wound up writing thirteen in total. I'm debating on either adding some material in the existing books or adding another book to show the politics of the empire and some of the skullduggery going on in the palace and the capital. Since the publisher that I'm working with doesn't seem to mind longer word counts, expanding the existing books might be better.
Why so long? I don’t know. Maybe God wanted me to make it long. Maybe I just couldn’t finish the story properly without doing it justice. But I needed to finish it before releasing book one.
I’ve seen the frustration that fans of A Song of Ice and Fire have for the long overdue finale of the series, and I couldn’t follow suit. I needed to finish it before putting book one up for sale. That is fair to the readers. So yes, the series is done, though there’s a lot of editing to do. But at least it’s finished, with all the major plot points tied up and a happily ever after . . . maybe . . . not for everyone. Muhaha!