Looking at the Finish Line

The first book of the Triempery Revelations series, Sordaneon, was published in 2021. Since then I’ve published a new book in the series each year. This is easy to do when all six books are already written and the series completely finished before even beginning to publish them. The final book, The Rill Lord, will be published early next year, in 2026.

I wrote the Triempery Revelations books over a period of decades. To say how many decades would make me sound incredibly old, so let’s just say I spent a great deal of my life writing it. During that time a lot happened, the most important of which for the books is... I became a better writer! While writing the Triempery books I also wrote and published other books in other subgenres—and with every book I got better at something new: dialogue, action scenes, worldbuilding, and characterization.

As happens in life, I did a lot of living too. I married and had children and enjoyed diverse careers in medicine, academia, regional government, and public works. I traveled a lot. The marriage failed; the divorce was pure hell. My finances hit rock bottom—but then I bounced back. Through it all I had a blast.

And I poured all of it into the Triempery books: my writing skills, my life experience, my travel and lessons learned and the pain of being a not terribly unique or successful human. For all those decades the Triempery series was my refuge, my private sandbox, and the books held the characters I loved most.

I made some attempts to publish the Triempery Revelations over the years by reaching out to agents. Agents, though, were either dismissive—I was laughed at publicly on one agent’s blog for being too old for them to want me as an author—or not interested in yet another sprawling epic fantasy. So I just wrote, and rewrote, and polished the stories for myself. I loved the Triempery books and so did a few other people who read them in places like the Online Writers Workshop or when I shared my work with other authors. That's how my publisher, Forest Path Books, found me.

All that perpetual reimagining and polishing did wonders in the end. It gave the series incredible unity from start to finish. As I wrote events in later books I could—and did—go back into earlier books to weave in needed characters or background. In fact, I wrote two of the earlier books last because they were needed to flesh out important characters and events. And whenever I polished the earlier books I could—and did—go into the later books to make certain the characters, events, and outcomes of those books were consistent.

The Walled City, the book being published this month (April 2025), is the fifth book of the Triempery Revelations series. The penultimate book. There is only one more after it. In The Walled City the world of the books is being torn apart. To be fair, the Triempery has been getting hammered and tested and broken since the first book. This is a series about a civilization meeting its end—how that happens and why that happens—and how this disintegration affects not just the people directly responsible but also the people on the fringes, the ones to whom things happen that they don’t understand.

Things like magic. Things like Entities that people had thought would never change but which are changing in terrible ways. And also people who rise to meet those changes... because there are people who will do that, either to take advantage of the change or try to keep the damage—to society, to the very world around them—to a minimum... or maybe just to survive it.

I see the end of this series approaching. There’s a final book, The Rill Lord, at the end of this tunnel of a series and it’s barreling toward me faster than I ever imagined. It’s in editing right now and will be here in one year.

One. Year. I’m rather awestruck by that.

After all, I’ve been writing these books for almost all of my life. I talk with these characters every day, tweak their lives, build new arcs, give them something new. The published books won’t change though. Those parts of the Creation are fixed in the firmament. Sharing my creation with readers has been an incredible joy and I’m incredibly humbled.  

It’s funny, though. Reaching the end of the series doesn’t feel real. Does any story ever fully end?

For me, this one never will.