One of my favorite settings is Maxxim Industries in the Astrid Maxxim books.  It is the home of Astrid Maxxim’s lab and workshops. Maxxim Industries has two inspirations– Swift Enterprises in the Tom Swift Jr. books, and Disneyworld.

In the Tom Swift Jr. books, Tom worked on the grounds of Swift Enterprises, a four mile square (as opposed to four square miles) complex of factories and airfields and laboratories. Since Astrid is a Tom Swift-like character and the story is essentially my take on that type of book, she needed someplace similar.

I remember being fascinated by Disneyworld when I watched Walt Disney talk about it on TV when I was little. Disneyworld, unlike Disneyland, is not just a theme park. It’s basically an entire county in Florida (80,000 acres) run by the Walt Disney Company, with theme parks sure, but also private residences, a Disney police force and Disney fire department, and undeveloped land.

I wanted something more like Disneyworld for Astrid– some huge county-sized place, dotted with installations, so I sat down and mapped out 180,000 acres of the southwest, in a nondescript part of an undisclosed state.

It’s a funny thing.  I had started and stopped writing Astrid Maxxim and the Antarctic Expedition several times, but by the time I was done, I was just hitting my stride.  I immediately started working on Astrid Maxxim and her Hypersonic Space Plane.  The previous books had hinted quite a bit about what would be in this book and I just continued on.

This was without a doubt the quickest I had ever finished a book.  I started the rough draft August 24, 2014 and finished it September 13th.  Twenty-one days inclusive.  The very next day, I started on His Robot Girlfriend: Charity, It took forty-two days, exactly twice as long, but still pretty quick.  A big part of this is probably because I just finished a second twelve credit graduate program at SUU, and I hadn’t been able to write much during those months.

The cover for the book went through half a dozen drafts as we got just the right spacecraft and image of Astrid.  Though not created at the same time, this cover and the one for the upcoming Astrid Maxxim and her Outpost in Space fit really well together.

When I first wrote Astrid Maxxim and her Amazing Hoverbike, I set for myself a loose expectation that I would write one Astrid Maxxim book a year.  I had written the first in 2011 and the second in 2013, so I was already a year behind.  By this time, I was half finished The Sorceress and her Lovers, and really needed something light to clear my head.

I had always planned to take Astrid to the Antarctic.  There were many reasons for this.  First: Tom Swift (my inspiration) had gone on such journeys.  Tom Swift and the Caves of Ice, and the Tom Jr. story: Tom Swift and the Caves of Nuclear Fire.  Second, I had hinted as much with Astrid’s discovery of the dust-covered chest marked “Antarctic Expedition” in Astrid’s basement.  Finally, the Antarctic is a timely location, with the subject of climate change so much in the news.

I wrote a chapter or two and then set the book aside, while I worked on His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue.  Then I returned and wrote a bit more, only to put it aside to work on The Sorceress and her Lovers.  Once the other book was done, I returned to Astrid.  Somewhere in writing this book, I got off my outline and ended up with a couple of chapters two or three times longer than I had intended.  I went back, edited them down, and renumbered chapters, but in the end, it was still off.  This book has only 17 chapters while the others have 19 or 20.

This book works better as a part of the overall series than it does as a single volume.  Lately, sales of this book and the other Astrid Maxxim books are really taking off, which makes me very happy.  While written for teens, I think it holds up pretty well, and adults might find some nostalgia in here, as I do.

One final note.  Matthew Riggenback at Shaed Studios did the cover, as he has all the Astrid Maxxim books.  We had more trouble with this one than any of the others.  We had a hard time finding an Astrid in cold weather gear.  The first few versions looked even more like they came from a fashion magazine.  Then we had a great background picture, but to get our girl in, we had to cover up either the snowmobile/sled or the base camp.  In the end, we covered up the base camp, which is too bad, because it really looked pretty cool and perfect for the story.

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, 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.  I think it’s my favorite of the series so far.  Of course there are two more Astrid Maxxim books coming pretty soon, as I already have the outlines for them.  And I have plans for many more after that.

Astrid has grown to be my second best selling series, after Robot: Patience.  That makes me very happy, because I really love writing them.