In part one I talked about how the how concept kicked off.

Part two saw me discuss the start of the novella series.

This will wrap everything up.

So yeah Book One was out and getting decent word and I was working on Book Two. Except something in it didn’t click for me. I couldn’t make the plot work quite right anymore and I had also written myself into a corner, to boot. It was a bad week or two there. I spent a lot of time on the phone to friends, bitching about how I just needed to solve these few little problems and everything would be all right.

Except the solution didn’t happen for a while. And then something else did. You see I found a solution to my plot issue, not the corner I wrote myself into. Fixing that plot problem though … well, I had an idea for how to end the series and it needed a pretty big plot left right near the end. I won’t spoil any story here for people who haven’t read the thing yet but it was a biggish left.

And it didn’t work where I had it. It would have, in fact, blown up the book and sunk it pretty badly. Right at the end. So I found a way to shift things around and move the left further up. Which had some ripples. Suddenly my plot for Book Two was half-gone and all my notes for Book Three became mostly unusable. I had to go back to the drawing board.

Now remember how these books came out every 6 months? Well there is a bunch of time there for production. The book had to be laid out, proofed and printed and … everything else. But that ate up a large part of the 6 month break. We were already close to the wire.

If I replotted everything I would lose a chunk of time I didn’t have. If I didn’t replot everything I would sink the entire series by being bad at my job. I replotted. I called Vince and warned him and got to work.

I then took a week off my day job and wrote all of Book Two in a single week. Well, except for the first little opening bits. The crushing deadline forced me to just stop thinking and get some work done. Insane, sure, but doable every now and then.

So anyway! The rest of the series came out, pretty much as planned, and we sat and judged it all a worthwhile experiment. Except it felt like a good idea to collect it and release the whole story at once. We decided to wait a while, then had to fit it into his schedule for publication and then deal with a delay or three.

Along the way I decided that beside getting the original short story back into place I would do something for the end. I wanted to give people a reason to consider rebuying this stuff. I thought of a few different stories I could do and tried a bunch of them on for size, but only one actually fit. So I worked it up and slid it into place.

It’s utterly different from the rest of the series, on purpose. Just as, to me, the series is utterly different from the short that it started as.

Still, I spent years working in, thinking about and dealing with Strange Angel and now with this new book out it is done. I’ll miss it, partly, and partly I’ll be glad it’s over. But either way it is a testament to trying new concepts in my storytelling, to having some fun and building characters that you may or may not like but you’ll enjoy.

And it’s almost out, as of this writing. Like – I hear a delay but also hear any day now. Maddening. As soon as it is out I will link it here and so on.

Anyway. I hope you enjoy it.