In honor of the launching of the second book in my third trilogy, FLU SEASON, I thought I would wax poetic over my three trilogies and how they came about and how they proceeded. Of course the third book of my third trilogy has yet to be published but it is complete and considered finished, so it counts. Now I have a set of three trilogies and thus have achieved the Trifecta! These nine volumes make up fully half of my writing output of 17 novels. (All novels are available in paperback and for Kindle; click on links at the top right corner of this blog.)
THE DREAM LAND
The first book, originally titled The Dreamland, was composed back in those days of typewriters and mailing a box of paper to a publisher. It was intended to be a stand-alone novel. Yet being full of interdimensional intrigue on an alien world, there was much room for utilizing the world I'd created. The first book, retitled Long-Distance Voyager, covered everything I had intended for the story and I had no idea for a second book. I eventually had an idea and launched right into the second book. But I got stopped a short way into it. I ran into a plot conundrum and sat it aside to figure out how to proceed. Then life got in the way and I did not return to it for ten years.
The first book, originally titled The Dreamland, was composed back in those days of typewriters and mailing a box of paper to a publisher. It was intended to be a stand-alone novel. Yet being full of interdimensional intrigue on an alien world, there was much room for utilizing the world I'd created. The first book, retitled Long-Distance Voyager, covered everything I had intended for the story and I had no idea for a second book. I eventually had an idea and launched right into the second book. But I got stopped a short way into it. I ran into a plot conundrum and sat it aside to figure out how to proceed. Then life got in the way and I did not return to it for ten years.
The conundrum was figured out by then and I continued it, taking it into a kind of time travel plot that was quite mind-twisting. When I was ready to throw book 1 into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition, I was also finishing writing book 2. By the time I finally got book 1 published, I knew it would be a trilogy so I came upon the idea for book 3 without too much gnashing of plot lines. As book 2 Dreams of Future's Past, was being published I was already writing book 3, titled Diaspora. It followed immediately after book 2 in the publishing schedule and I was very happy, thinking I might not be able to write more. I did dabble at a book 4 but didn't get very far and have not resumed writing it.
Being first, and introducing a new world of steampunk fashion and geopolitical skulduggery, it did well enough. Book 2, while being more ambitious and thought-provoking, sat on the shelf. Book 3, while deemed by me my most humorous of the three as well as the most horrifying, was hardly touched. That is the issue with trilogies, I suppose.
THE STEFAN SZEKELY TRILOGY
After a while, I decided to join the vampire trend and wrote a novel purportedly a medically accurate vampire story. My hero was Stefan Szekely, an ordinary guy, American of Hungarian ancestry, with an odd background. I threw a lot of personal angst into it, and came to realize I could make a pretty good vampire myself, given the chance. One and done, was my intention. But the ending nagged me through the writing of two other completely unrelated novels.
What happened to our vampire hero after the first novel ended? Because I'd set the story in the same year as I was writing it (2013-14), I began to jump ahead in the timeline. Thirteen years into the future we pick up our story - and a trilogy was born, both novels conceived at the same time although the exact story line was still vague. It was really an exercise in traveling in my head and doing research about Croatia and Hungary and calling them novels.
I wrote SUNRISE and SUNSET back to back. The first novel, A DRY PATCH OF SKIN, was well-received and garnered attention among the vampiric crowd. Book 2 was less popular, perhaps because the vampire trend was already receding. So Book 3 received little attention, although I thought I put some amazingly evocative material in it. I planned a book 4 and started writing it but got stopped when the even-further-into-the-future world I set it in began to overwhelm me with technologies I didn't have the patience to figure out.
Then I wrote three stand-alone novels: a sci-fi story with a non-human hero, a contemporary crime thriller, and an action/adventure story about a man-eating tiger. Then I was bored.
FLU SEASON: A Pandemic Trilogy
I've blogged about this trilogy in the past few months, so let me go over some of the history of its creation. I started something at the beginning of our real pandemic but didn't get far. The idea boiled inside my head for another year. When I found a way to start it and thought what would occur in the journey plotline, I still believed it was going to be a stand-alone novel. However, a journey is all well and good, but what happens when our hero and his Mom arrive? What then?
Giving the first book the subtitle of The Book of Mom, I let it be a narrative by a teen boy about his single mother and all her quirks and whims while fighting to get them to safety from both viruses and violence. Once they arrived at a kind of sanctuary, I knew it had to be a trilogy. I already had ideas of what would happen next. By the end of book 1, I definitely knew how book 2 would begin and end.
By the end of book 2, The Way of the Son, I had book 3 planned - although I do not write out an outline like many authors do. Just as book 2 picks up where book 1 ends (like on the same day!), book 3 also picks up where book 2 ends. The difference is that book 3, Dawn of the Daughters, has a lot of ground to cover story-wise. It could be a stand-alone in its own right, if I had conceived of the story first instead of the book 1 we now have.
Too early to tell how this trilogy will be received. As of this blog posting, books 1 and 2 are out and available with book 3 scheduled to be published in the fall of 2023. The main thing, I think, is that I've enjoyed creating these various worlds and the characters who inhabit them. I only hope that others will enjoy reading these stories as much as I enjoyed writing them.
(C) Copyright 2010-2023 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog.
Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.
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