In the Beginning...

I've been blogging out here for several years now.  It's sort of been a personal diary (as if a non-marketed site for a non-marketed series would find readers).  It's also been fun.  But with the upcoming promotion in GoodReads, I am hoping a few people might stop in and check things out.

Recommendation:  Check out the Cover Art by Amy Nagi.  She's amazing.

The following paragraphs are intended to give you background into the roots of this series.  I've covered much of this in earlier blogs, but there is no need to go back and reread past musings.  I will provide this WARNING.  As I discuss where this series came from, there will be some SPOILERS.  I don't think they are major, but if you want to be totally surprised, you may not want to read this.  

FINAL WARNING:  THERE ARE SOME SPOILERS AHEAD

The beginning was somewhere around 1980, give or take a year or two.  I'm still in college at this point, but getting ready to graduate soon (Undergraduate degree in Accounting).  I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons with some friends and I've spent the past year creating a massive adventure I wanted to unleash upon them for a series of adventures.  But just as I'm ready to roll it out, one my friends decides its time to put D&D aside and move on with life.  We're still friends today, but he just decided to spend his time on other pursuits.  No hard feelings there.

The timing felt right to another friend and thus our D&D group disbanded.  My adventure maps, notes and NPC character sheets remained stacked in a drawer.  Ah, but the glorious adventures I imagined in my mind just wouldn't go away.  And I didn't want to forget them.  And so I started writing an adventure as if we were still playing the game.  But it was written in a style where I was chronicaling an adventure as if it already took place.  It was all past tense.  It wasn't intended to be a book at this point, but just a stack of pages summarizing the adventure.

Move forward about a year or two.  Now I'm working full time at an entry level job.  I've gotten married and we've moved into a small apartment.  No kids yet, but we have our first pet cat, Fluffy.  Anyway. I decided to turn my pages of chronicles into a book.  The originally planned adventure included a journey through a system of tunnels (this later became the basis for the trip through the Khanian Mountains), a large city the adventurers could eventually be based out of (this later became the basis for Izmira) and a dangerous quest to acquire three powerful artifacts (this was the basis for the Dragon artifacts).  A major threat or villain was needed and thus Terek was born.

As I turned these adventures into a story, my original plan was to write a trilogy.  They were going to be named, The Crown of Dragons, The Sceptre of Dragons and The Shroud of Dragons.  I took my original NPCs and came up with more elaborate backgrounds for each.  I created a journey for them and split them into two groups.  I decided that if I was going to track their journey, I needed a map.  And thus I created the known civilized world.  And then I had to give it a name.  Verdan was born, but it really was just a name that stuck and has no other particular meaning.

I decided that I needed a high level outline or roadmap for my series to follow.  It was important to me that all the events in the story eventually tied into the larger storyline.  As the outline developed I realized that I had more story to tell than could fit in a trilogy.  After I completed the Dragon Artifact Trilogy, I was going to transition into a storyline about the The Stones of Power (the basis for the Dewnor Power Stones).  My thoughts were leaning toward six books, then twelve and eventually I settled back to nine.  I had my high level storyline.  The artifacts now took a back seat to telling the story of these characters and their journey through life.  The story was going to be about life itself.

And then I finally realized the story I really wanted to tell.  Flashback a half dozen years to 1974 or 1975.  I'm still in high school taking a class on Science Fiction.  We were reading Bradbury, Asimov and other classic SciFi writers.  We had an assignment to write a short story and I ended up telling a tragic tale about someone who learned a secret that undermined their beliefs.  In the end, they couldn't live with the truth and comitted suicide.  

I'm not going to go into any more details, because it would give away far too much of the Verdan Chronicles.  Suffice it to say that I have beliefs about the universe that many people would reject.  That's ok, they are for me.  The character in my short story represented the general population and their suicide represented their rejection of the truth.  Seriously, I'm not a dark person and have never personally entertained thoughts of suicide, but it felt right in the story.  I got an A on the assignment, but sadly never saved that paper, so it is forever lost.  And while my beliefs have since matured, they didn't fully go away and became the true basis for the series.  This is when the title The Fourth Age was born.

Back to the Verdan Chronicles.  And so I took my original D&D adventure chronicles and turned it into a story.  At this point I was handwriting the story during breaks at work (I was working third shift at the time) and then retyping them (on a typewriter) at home.  I still have those original writings and typewritten pages.  Although the book your reading has gone through about nine more rounds ot editing.  My apologies for that, because I really believe the last edit or two may have made some portions worse rather than better.  Although I can honestly say that 90% of the story or more has remained intact throughout all the edits.

This went on for a year or two and then my "job" became a "career" and I started getting promotions.  I went back to school for my MBA degree and my wife and I celebrated the birth of our son (first of two).  I only had a little over a half of a book done at this point (along with a high level outline for the series), but I put it aside.  Life took over.  About a dozen years later I made an attempt to resurrect the story and wrote maybe another six to eight chapters.  And then life took over again.

It wasn't until 2007 that I realized the story was still important to me.  It wasn't important that it be published or that others read it, but I really wanted to finish it.  I knew how the story would end, but I really didn't know the fate of each of my characters.  I wanted the story to dictate that.  And so finishing the series became a bucket list item.  if you want to know how it evenually became published, then I will refer you to earlier blogs.  And here we are.  All nine books in the original story are done.  The first seven are published and you can expect the last two to be published later this year.  The story is done, but the journey for Verdan and some of the characters has some pages left to turn.  And thus I'm working on a tenth book (possibly an eleventh and twelvth), but those won't be published unless there are actual others interested in reading them.

And that takes me back to you.  I do hope you enjoy the series.  I think the writing is good, but it is still an area I need to work on.  I probably always will.  But I offer no apologies for the story.  It came out perfectly like I wanted it to.  It encompasses all the familiar thoughts and elements that I've enjoyed in other stories, but brings them together into an overarcing (and I hope unique) tale.