Welcome to my little space at the end of the novel, where Orbit still graciously lets me ramble for a few pages. I’ve written twenty-nine of these at this point, so you’d expect I would be good at them, or have an idea of what I wanted to accomplish with them. Hah! With some books it is easy. I’ll tend to talk about a moment that was particularly important to me, the reasons why events unfolded as they did, or the decisions that led to it (see the end of, say, Voidbreaker for an example of that). A lot of it comes down to what the book means to me and what I wish to say about it that I cannot do explicitly within the text itself.

But what Bladed Faith means to me is a bit more complicated. My first… nineteen novels, I believe, were all set in the same world of Dezrel. So, despite writing a lot, it was mostly in one setting. The Seraphim trilogy was my first-ever attempt at doing something in a significantly different world, and to stretch my world-building skills beyond the more traditional Dungeons & Dragons–inspired setting. With Seraphim, I wanted to capture a more energetic feeling, with a more modern setting, akin to something you’d find in an anime like Attack on Titan or Fullmetal Alchemist.

Then came The Keepers. I wanted to return to monsters and magic, but this time all of my own creation. Crawling mountains, onyx faeries, an adorable sentient fire pet named Puffy, who basically became the mascot of the book. The storytelling changed with it, as I tried to let the story build and expand based on the characters’ decisions, a seemingly small initial conflict blossoming into world-shattering implications (as I did so long ago with my very first series, The Half-Orcs). I was trying to recapture the past while growing as a world-builder. Success or failure obviously rests on the reader to judge, but I’m pleased with how personal I was able to keep such a project.

The Bladed Faith, however, started out unique among my entire catalog. I did not start with an overarching plot thread that I then filled out with characters (as I did with Seraphim). I did not build up a setting, and then try to figure out which characters would be most interesting to follow (as I did in Keepers). I was actually in the middle of finishing up Voidbreaker, the third book in the Keepers trilogy, when I took a two-week break. During those two weeks, I did something I’d never done before. I wrote short stories, one for each character, for the cast I would follow for my next project.