AUTHOR'S NOTES

A Note from the Author

This series was only supposed to be three books long. This one would be the Act 2, the return of the villain. For my trilogy, this was supposed to be like Empire Strikes Back was for star wars.

Alas though, I wrote myself into a bit of a pickle. See along with that three book series, there was also ANOTHER alien race involved. Unfortunately for this race, they were more or less written out of existence at some point a year before this book was completed.

The other aliens were originally the reason for the Guardians. Humanity had discovered them and traded technology with them and started to build Guardians using the advanced AI technology they got from these aliens. The Linkal were supposed to know of the other Aliens and distrust them deeply.

Unfortunately, I ended up not liking the feel of it, and every time I tried to work them back in, it just felt wrong. So I cut them out.

Snip.

I wish it was that easy. It took extensive rewrites which radically changed the face of the first book, Wayward Guardian, and had ripples for my third book. The Aliens were supposed to have shown up in book three to kind of help wrap things up, but since they no longer exist, it means the humans have to deal with what the humans made.

In a way that's a much better story. I love the idea of humanity having to face their own creation, it’s much more satisfying to do it that way.

But it had the unfortunate side effect of making my planned trilogy into a series of 6 books, or maybe 5. We shall see.

Of course I say unfortunate, but it excites me to no end. See when I realized how it was going to go down, it forced me to be a lot more creative with my story. I couldn’t count on this alien race to show up and escalate everything. I had to make my lovely squishy humans figure it out on their own.

And boy do they ever.

Now something else I'd like to mention, is that I wrote this book immediately after reading Rendezvous with Rama Novel by Arthur C. Clarke. It really effected me. I loved the tightness of the story taking place in what amounted to a single location. I wanted to capture some of that magic, and... well... I don't do it justice. Arthur C. Clarke is a big name in sci-fi for a reason. That said, challenging myself like that was a very rewarding experiment on my part. The next books are not as tight in focus. They tend to expand quite a bit in comparison.

As always, if you liked what you read, you can always leave me a tip, from the button in the top right. Or, if you purchased a digital copy for the device of your choice, you could leave a review. You also have the option of just telling someone about it and convincing them to give it a go. Any one of these would be very helpful.

Catch you next time!