Dead Skies✔️

AFTERWORD

That one was definitely a lot more hopeful and less bleak than Dead Ice.

Like the novella before it, Dead Skies came from a curious place.

So back in 2014-2015, I was like super desperate to get the word out about my writing. As I said in the previous afterword, that's one of the main inspirations for Dead Skies. But at one point I was going to write a trilogy of novelettes called Necropolis - Endurance (this was before I renamed Necropolis 2 to Necropolis 2 - Endurance), and they were to be cowritten with my friend M. Knepper. We actually got partway into writing the first one and even put together some really cool covers, but ultimately they were scrapped because I had way too much on my plate as it was.

This was all back during 2014.

When 2015 rolled around, I was in the process of wrapping up the original series of The Shadow Wars. I intended it to be nine novels long, ending with Countdown, and then I wasn't sure what I was going to do.

Well, I ultimately settled on writing a sequel series, but I knew I needed time. Like actual time.

I was also still desperate to get noticed, and so I decided I was going to put all of The Shadow Wars back up on WattPad. I think. Admittedly, my memory and even my posting at the time was spotty.

Mostly, I think I just was being bugged by a few cool ideas for a sequel and wanted something simple and relatively short to write to get it out of my head. And also maybe I wanted to make up for that miserable ending.

Either way, I planned it and wrote it in mid-2015, and posted it to WattPad. I have a clear memory of being on vacation in Colorado with my in-laws, sitting in a cabin that had a view out the window of basically Skyrim, and writing Dead Skies.

I posted it while having the relatively easy task of editing a chapter every few days of all nine of my Shadow Wars novels.

I actually changed the ending later. The original ending saw Laura and Mike leaving the planet. In the original version, the ship they found had FTL capabilities, and they decided they'd had it with zombie fighting. But later on, I decided I wanted to make it a trilogy. The best choice? Not really. I think Dead Ice stood best on its own, but I'd already committed to a sequel, so why not another?

The only other factoid I have is that Dead Skies was heavily inspired by my Halo fan fiction Living Dead, which you can still read over on my FFNet profile. You'll see some very obvious similarities.

Anyway, that's all I've got. Dead Rain is up next.