So, you think it’s fun to finish a novel, to put the final touches to a work on which you have lavished your energy, your talent, and your love for months or even years, and written The End as the definitive last words? Well, sort of. First off, like house repair and maintenance, it is never done. Rewrites continue up to the point of publication, and you always have a few nagging passages – hopefully not chapters – that continue to call out for improvement and refinement even then. It’s always a work in progress, even after that progress has been artificially frozen by publication.
Then there’s what I call the post-partem depression. After months of effort and endless demands, of honing and refining a work of love, of working every day to build and expand and improve, suddenly, there’s nothing more to do. You’re done. Finished. And you’re left with this little bundle of joy that might end up winning the Nobel Peace Prize or in jail for all sorts of unspeakable crimes. You’re physically exhausted, mentally drained, and facing the prospect of a long and difficult period with no experience to guide you: namely, publication.
Sound rough? Consider, then, what it’s like to complete a trilogy. Three times the horrors, three times the doubts? Well partially. The issues with the completion of the first two works do loom anew with the conclusion of the series, and the terrible question of is-this-stuff-any-good is more than tripled, the whole being worse than the sum of the parts. You just put it out there for all the world to see, with your name attached to it, and then you did it again and again, making clear you don’t regret – or don’t recognize – the initial mistake you made.
Can it get worse? Oh, yeah. Most trilogies launch in series, the first gathering reviews and criticisms before the other two hit the shelves, at least preparing you for what’s coming and perhaps even helping you make some mid-course corrections in the latter works. But what if you’re publishing them all together? That’s about to happen later this year when we launch what I’m calling the Behind the World Trilogy, three short, fast paced urban fantasies centered around the characters of Father Homer and Francisco Stampa. Full disclosure: the first book, Black Jack, is a republication of House Amongst the Dunes, originally published in 2021 as a stand alone novel. When its two siblings unexpectedly came along, it was necessary to go back and get the first work to fall in line with the other two.
Oh, it gets worse yet. Because rather than attending to the considerable demands of polishing and finishing one novel, you find the paperwork tripled. It’s Whack-a-Mole on steroids. You’ve put the first book to bed, comfortable you’ve done everything (mostly) right, but then somebody calls into question one of the main secondary characters. And when you go back and look at that character in isolation, you see the point. So, you dive back in, making the necessary corrections and bringing the culprit up to speed, only to have major edits dropped on you for the third novel that’s still going through the proofing stage. Then a new proofreader completely pans the middle work that you considered finished, requiring a careful review to see how much of that critique is legitimate and how much personal bias – or indigestion.
Want more? All characters should grow and develop over the course of the book, coming to a personal climax or at least a new understanding about themselves, their compatriots, or the world. So, the central characters of the trilogy not only should grow in each individual book, they need to grow in each successive book, building on what they’ve learned in the previous works to a final resolution at the end of the third novel. This goes for the “mega plot” as well, that overarching storyline that binds the three books together, beyond the individual plots of each one. A climax of the climaxes, if you will. But then there is the single great advantage to holding back all three to publish at once: you get to make adjustments to the earlier works based on how things twist and turn and end up in the last book. A second bite at multiple apples.
Have I done it? Was I successful in pulling all these diverse elements together in three closely related novels? I’ll let you know later in the year, with all three hopefully up in November. Then you can let me know how well I did in 2026 with sales and reviews!
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