This month I’m releasing a new free collection! It's pretty exciting for me. It kinda presented itself in 2004 with a short story I wrote called “The Banshee.” In this story, a mysterious warrior named Ky shows up to defend a small village from an approaching army. I knew very little about the warrior, even less about the approaching army. All I knew was that some characters important to the rest of my world were children in that village.
As my career has gone on, and the books have started to pile up, I’ve noticed that in the writings there are things happening that seem out of time. It occurred to me in 2015 that I had at least one time traveling character emerging. I immediately thought of “The Banshee” and put that idea on hold, let it simmer. As more and more of the books were written, this same story kept coming back to me. I started seeing events that never could have taken place without forewarning, parts in my books where a little shove or a silent slice had changed the course of history, ushering in new things.
The best example of this is in the book Legends of the Exiles. You can trace the storyline of a character named Jocelyn all the way back to an event that happens when she’s a 3-year-old child before the opening of the book. This one event, this one cut, not only changed her future but the future of another character named Drelis, and in the end, resulted in Peter Redfist. One domino after the other fell and created a reality where Peter existed instead of a different hero.
Things like this started showing up everywhere, and I didn’t know much about it. I didn’t know where it came from. I had no information, but I kept writing. Events continued to unfold, and pretty soon, another strange thing happened. In the book Hemlock, a good and pristine man named Tyga, with a long history of lawful deeds, ends up becoming part of a crew of monsters known as the Hoodsmen. All the people in this crew are evil except this one man, and his entry into that group was a mystery to me. I saw him again in Crown, still he was a mystery. I saw him again in Wrath of Madness, Plight of Madness, and Fate of Madness, and still I could not answer how this great man had fallen. Well, all I could do was keep writing, and years later, it came to me. I became aware of how these two characters, Ky and Tyga, were linked. And the question of the time traveling feature in my work was answered.
The result is a collection of stories that will stretch on throughout my career. I’ll add one story after the next to this collection until all the stories have folded in on each other to tell the tale of a war between two time traveling entities, a war raging out of sight from the rest of the world, where pieces are put into place that spark tremendous events. I call this collection The Silent War of the Sour Eye. And I will be releasing it as the years go by in my newsletter. So, here I present free of charge, the first two installments of The Silent War of the Sour Eye.
