Trivia, Interviews, and Author Comments

## Trivia

Kara, Sonya, and Valterius were loosely inspired by characters from the popular 1990s-2000s show “Xena, Warrior Princess” as Lucy Lawless’s Xena and her bard companion Gabriella (Renee O’Connor), along with Kevin Sorbo’s Hercules were known to defy the odds and defeat evil. Similarly, the Vampyre trio often banded together during their earliest years for safety and solidarity and shared certain attributes with the group.

Evanescence’s goth-rock ballad “Lithium” was the core inspiration for Kara’s character. The lyrics closely resemble Kara’s inner sense of loss and emptiness while she searches for meaning, and in the end is subjected to letting her old ways go. In tribute, some of Kara’s physical features were adopted from the vocalist and pianist, Amy Lee.

Krystal’s infamous “taco scene” in Affliction was entirely ad-libbed and written outside the planned outline for the chapter, as their dialogue and comedic banter proved too valuable to remove after having been written on-the-fly.

While Sorrow took nearly seven years to write and finish to publication quality, Affliction was ready after two years (delays to print occurred due to the global COVID-19 pandemic), and Desolation was finished within 8 months. Despair, however, was written in its entirety within the span of 90 days with editorial and manuscript development sessions sometimes lasting 14 hours a day.

Some of the more intense scenes in Desolation and Despair were written in an intoxicated state. The author has repeatedly said that the “Deliverance” chapter in Desolation was one of the most vile things he has ever had to write, and refused to approach the chapter sober.

Each book cover resembles the amount of “Darkness” in the story and provides a visual indicator of the emotional intensity of each volume. Despair is an exception, since the characters of the book fixate on hope rather than loss for the first time.

The original length of Desolation (prior to the rebranding to a four-book series) would have been in excess of 1,000 standard paperback pages. This was one of the primary drivers to rebranding from the *Trilogy* *Editions* to the *Legacy Editions,* as four full-length books were needed to cover the full story and accommodate for bringing the quality of *Sorrow* up to the rest of the series.

## Author Comments

Quote from the author regarding Sorrow’s first release:

> *“When Sorrow was first released under the Trilogy Edition in 2017, massive rushes to production and a severe editorial oversight led to last-minute and unapproved changes, absent credit to the photographer for my headshot (Thanks Danny!), along with a host of issues in the text itself. I felt uncomfortable reading what it had turned into, and when I finished Affliction I knew that Sorrow would never be successful without rewrites in the form of a second edition. I was lucky that the rebranding to The Legacy of Sorrow aligned with those goals, and I can finally tell the story the way it should always have been told.”*
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Quote from the author regarding Desolation’s “Deliverance” chapter:

> *“That kind of violence and horror…there’s not a way to write that without tears. No way to write that without feeling this horrific pain that goes parallel with the character’s. Everything she experienced, I had to play out in my head and I resented the fact it even existed. More than once, I wanted to delete the whole thing because I felt guilty beyond recall. I had to accept that it was a part of the story, regardless of what I personally wanted, and that it was the result of Schillinger’s concept of ‘requisite evil.’ Deliverance was written with the help and guidance of sexual trauma survivors, and while I thought I already had a profound respect for survivors, listening to the reality of the evil I was writing makes the fiction so much more real than I had ever imagined. I hope that readers never see this part of the story as shock value or yet another tragic event, but as the story of someone conquering the reduction of their life to mere horrified moments, then rebuilding a life to defy the results of that terror.”*
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