It had been two years since I had published The Two Dragons, but it had actually been longer since I had written a Senta and the Steel Dragon book.  I was right in the middle of writing Astrid Maxxim and the Antarctic Expedition,  but set it aside and jumped into The Sorceress and her Lovers, without really even meaning to.

I had a long outline that was the original epilog of The Two Dragons, so I just followed along with it.  The return of Pantagria, Senta’s baby, and the Coral Dragon were three additions not in the original,  I had tacked her pregnancy onto The Two Dragons at the last minute, and I had created the Coral Dragon while writing The Young Sorceress.  Pantagria’s return provided the main story and set up the next book into what really amounts to a two-book arc.

This book felt a little unsettling for me.  I was writing in this world I had created, but it wasn’t the same.  The more I wrote of Iolana though, the more at home I felt.  This convinced me that she would be a major part of the next book.  Just as I was finishing this story, the plot for The Price of Magic just popped into my head.

Since His Robot Wife had turned out to be such a good seller and His Robot Girlfriend continued to be downloaded, I had planned on writing several more Patience stories.  I had a vague idea of writing a series of adventures for Mike and Patience as they took trips around the world.

This first in the series, would take them to Antarctica.  I was already working on Astrid Maxxim and the Antarctic Expedition, so I had two very different books in the same setting.  Each of the robot books would have a catchy subtitle that played on the name of Patience.

I wrote the first one which was focused on a mystery.  As I mentioned before, mysteries are not really my thing, but  I did my best with it.  In the end, the story was okay, but I wasn’t satisfied enough to continue on with the series.  I would keep the names at ready, but I decided right then and there that I wouldn’t write another Patience book unless I had a compelling story to tell.

I started writing Astrid Maxxim and her Undersea Dome at the end of 2012, about a year and a half after finishing Astrid Maxxim and her Amazing Hoverbike.  I knew that I wanted it to be an ocean adventure, because that was how the Tom Swift books I read as a boy went– alternating between air/space and ocean/other.

The undersea dome seemed such a natural progression for Astrid.  Since the invention of Astridium in book one– a superhard, ceramic material– could be made transparent, one of the first applications would be to create a geodesic dome under the sea.

I also wanted to introduce an ocean scientist to the series– some one who could fill the shoes of the late Jacque Cousteau.  So I created Dr. Feuillée.  He would go on to appear whenever I needed an ocean expert.  I have a few astronauts in the story, but as Astrid herself is something of an astrophysical engineering prodigy, they are less integral to the stories.

I’m very pleased with Astrid Maxxim and the Undersea Dome.  It really sort of cements the central cast of the series.  Astrid has grown to be my second best selling series, after Robot: Patience.  That makes me very happy, because I really love writing them.

After finishing the two Eaglethorpe Buxton stories way back in 2009, I had always planned to write a third to finish up the story arc.  I had planned out Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Queen of Aerithraine in my head shortly after I wrote Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Sorceress.  I just never seemed to find the time to sit down and write it.

In 2012, I finished writing The Young Sorceress and then polished up The Two Dragons, which had been written years before.  Then I spent a good bit of the year working on 82 Eridani: Journey (as yet upfinished and unpublished) and got about halfway through before kind of running out of steam.  I needed something to get me out of my own head, so I turned back to Eaglethorpe.

I’m always telling my son how to get rich– monetize your intellectual property.  Eaglethorpe was pretty popular, so rather than release a third free book I decided I would create something that those people who enjoyed it would be willing to pay for.  I decided I would write three new stories and bundle them with the two originals and sell it as a single book– The Many Adventures of Eaglethorpe Buxton.

Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Queen of Aerithraine was written in a few days.  I had the story floating around in my head for years, after all.

Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Amazons took only a little longer.  It was fun.  I had the basic idea, and the setting, like the other locations in EB, had come from the D&D game I had played years earlier with my kids.

I had the most fun writing Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Day of the Night of the Werewolf.  It started with only a title and went from there.  I just made it up as I went along.

I was pleased to finish The Many Adventures of Eaglethorpe Buxton and don’t really have any more stories at least like those.  Since publication, TMAOEB has been one of my slowest selling books, so the monetization hasn’t worked out so well, but if there’s a game company out there or a movie studio….

While I don’t have any more similar stories for Eaglethorpe, I have thought about some other possibilities.  One of them is Eaglethorpe’s Fractured Fairy Tales.  Another is Eaglethorpe Buxton’s Garden of Verse.  Maybe some day.

I think of this book as marking the beginning of my intermediate period.  One day I was standing in my living room looking at the row of yellow spines on my collection of Tom Swift Jr. books.

In the summer of 1969, I discovered Tom Swift Jr. among the possessions of my Uncle George, who had died the year before in Viet Nam. I started reading them and was hooked. I was hooked on Tom Swift, on science fiction, and on reading.

My first book, Princess of Amathar had been an homage to the Edgar Rice Burroughs books I had loved in my teens.  So that day, looking at Tom Swift, I thought, “that’s the type of book I should write next.” I wanted to capture the same feeling of excitement and innocence that I found when I read Tom Swift Jr., but I wanted to update the stories and make them my own. I sat down and created the setting and the characters, and made a list of inventions that stories could be built around.

There were two things that I always had trouble with, as a reader of Tom Swift. First, time never passed. Tom was always 18. The second, his inventions never seemed to change the world, no matter how innovative and revolutionary they were. I decided that Astrid’s inventions would change the world and she would age as the series progressed.  So far I’ve written six Astrid Maxxim books and have plans for as many as fifty.  I’d like to write at least one per year, but so far, I haven’t been.