There’s a reason Bladed Faith is dedicated to my wife. Because at this point, it was like… April of 2020, the pandemic lockdowns were in full swing, my grandiose and genre-breaking pitch was not impressing people, and I was ready to sink into full self-pity and declare my writing career dead and buried. Melodramatic, yes, but reading this novel should be proof enough that I can be a melodramatic person. Sam kept me grounded for my day or two of moping. My career was not over. My skills as a writer had not spontaneously combusted. Hell, I’d reworked trilogy pitches before (such as with The Keepers’ original outline versus what Orbit eventually accepted). So what was really bothering me? Why did this one inspire such panic?

So, I thought on it, and I knew the reason. I did not want to lose these side characters. Mari, Rayan, Stasia, Cyrus… I was emotionally invested in them. I knew they were good. I knew they were some of the best I’d done in my entire career. And so I stripped my plot back down to those first few chapters and rebuilt the story once more. Gone were the sci-fi elements. Gone were the thousands of worlds and the gate-hopping. Gone was the main character, far too intricately tied to the bone robots and the worlds-spanning religious empire. I started fresh, and I thought on what exactly I wanted to do.

As I mentioned earlier, each series of mine tends to have a goal or idea that I’m trying out for how I want to tell the story. For The Vagrant Gods, I decided it would be less of an experiment and more of a culmination. I would take what I loved from my various series and try to create what I would view as my path forward. This would be the series that, if you asked me what a definitive Dalglish novel was, I would no longer point to A Dance of Cloaks or The Broken Pieces. It would be this book. This trilogy.

A band of powerful friends/family like the Eschaton Mercenaries of The Half-Orcs and Shadowdance. The religious conflict of The Paladins. The anything-goes philosophy of The Keepers. And as always, my over-the-top battles, in a setting that would allow me to stretch my chops, like the aerial battles of The Seraphim. It’s a new world with new characters, but for so much of it, it felt like a homecoming.