Behind the Scenes

I guess it all started back in September 2019, when I was feeling a real sense of political unease and instability in the world, especially watching it all from here in Canada. I felt compelled to create a what-if story(What if Trump is permanently eliminated. Which almost happened in Butler) A lot of his detractors either won't or refuse to seriously look at what the consequences would be, and it would be nasty!— The story let me process that unease through fiction rather than commentary. The story took on a life of its own from there, and in some ways it's still evolving even now.
 

Then COVID came about in late 2019, and I wasn't expecting the lockdowns and the mandates that followed. That sense of a world spinning out of anyone's control — governments, institutions, the ground shifting under everyone's feet became the emotional seed of what I'd eventually build into the Calamity.
 

I also found myself pulled toward the uncertainty swirling around the vaccines at the time the sense that something genetically irreversible was being done to the world's people, whether or not that fear held up. That anxiety, real or not, worked its way into the Calamity scenario and became one of the engines behind a world quite different from the one we actually live in.
 

The story was supposed to be a novella-sized tale, 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 the villain and the foil to James, the hero, since I needed to keep the emperor and the empress in the background.
 

She wound up being so well received by my critique team that I decided to write Clara adventure stories that act as prequels to the main series. I'll get into Clara in another piece. So then it got up to eight books. I still wasn't satisfied.
 

Although book eight was supposed to be the ending, there were too many loose threads and plots that needed finishing, so I've wound up writing thirteen books in total. I'm debating whether to add material to the existing books or add another book entirely to show the politics of the empire and the skullduggery going on in the palace and the capital. Since the publisher I'm working with doesn't seem to mind longer word counts, expanding the existing books might be the better route.
 

Why so long? I don't know. 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 fans of A Song of Ice and Fire have over the long-overdue finale of that series, and I couldn't follow suit. I needed to finish mine before putting book one up for sale — that's only fair to the readers. So yes, the series is done, though there's a lot of editing left 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!