Talisman: Halcyon centers around a man who has already experienced loss and betrayal and now faces an almost insurmountable conflict involving the multiverse and the search for truth. What is the most challenging aspect of writing a series?

I think, as a pantser, the biggest difficulty comes from not necessarily knowing the entire story or character arc. To be frank, I had NO idea I was going to wind up in the multiverse in Halcyon. Ha! I really didn’t. It just grew and ballooned into something far beyond my own comprehension, and I was running alongside the story, panting, just trying to keep up. I’m so pleased with how it turned out, however. You have to have at least an idea of where to take the characters. For me, one thing I really longed to do was to tie this series into my other series and standalone novels. Through references, common characters, etc., you can link them, but that doesn’t mean that this story will serve its own ends as a standalone. It has to be robust and weighty enough to do that. And where that comes from is really allowing you to get heavily invested in the lives and purposes of the protagonists. I think by the end, it all worked out pretty well. I’m pleased with it.

Many of your characters wrestle with identity across timelines or realities. What draws you to the idea of “alternate selves” as a storytelling device?

The idea for the alternate selves was there initially when I first toyed with going into the multiverse, which in and of itself wasn’t really until I was about a quarter of the way through writing Halcyon. I thought more along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be neat if…” as opposed to “I’m intentionally going to do __.” But yes – when a character is forced to come face to face with themselves, there’s a primeval awakening that happens in that confrontation. You either awake to purpose or you awake to despair, I think. It really depends on who that character is and what they decide, within themselves, they must do. My characters awoke to purpose because of the greater conflict they were embroiled in. Any time you incorporate a doppelgänger, there needs to be a closure that happens that allows both selves to depart in peace, having accomplished their mission and resuming their independent life. The multiverse allowed me that, but it was still difficult to envision and sculpt. I very much enjoyed the challenge!

Was there a particular scene or moment that changed your understanding of the story while you were writing it?

Absolutely. There is a character in the story that I really needed to complete an arc that was painful. There were also elements at the very end that I wasn’t sure it were necessarily ’safe’ to travel down… tie-ins with other novels of mine that would definitely bridge the gap and allow more of the “Aaronverse” to take shape, but would they inherently violate the canon of those stories in the writing of this one? I really wasn’t sure. The best I could do was to honor them each with good storytelling. The arc of the character, and the subsequent arc of the story as a whole, really helped me to see the larger picture of what I was writing. I think that’s the luxury of being a pantser: your eyes are opened in the writing just as much as your readers’ eyes will be opened in the reading.

Can we look forward to more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?
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Definitely! I am currently working on my first overtly horror novel, Blood Echoes, set to be released in May. It is a standalone thriller. I do not have any plans to revisit the Dissonance hexalogy or The End or Talisman trilogies, but I do have hopes of constructing a fantasy novel to honor my primary literary inspiration, J.R.R. Tolkien. We’ll see if I’m finally courageous enough to do that, wink wink…. 🙂

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