Warfire | Broken Time Series: Book Two

Afterword

I've been very purposefully silent in my little after chats in the last few chapters. I just would've sounded like a broken record, only repeating how genuinely devastated I am from all this happening. And I wrote the damn thing! I knew all these characters were going to die for months—a year even, and I still cried. I cried for every one of them, and each for a different reason.

Gath, I'll admit, was always going to die, and I largely viewed him as a mistake. He was the typical comic relief character that I really didn't need, and if you remember, he wasn't originally a named character either. When I give characters names, more than likely that means they're going to play a key part in the story, or at least, they're gonna hang around for awhile. Named characters are characters with a purpose beyond existing in the background. So, I gave "Team 5 leader" the name Gathen Farvell, and his destiny was to be the first death.

I began changing my mind about giving Gath a name by the time they started flight training. I felt bad for pretty much creating Gath to be the "shock value" death to kick Nagan into his next arc. But he was already written in and I didn't feel like rewriting chunks of chapters, so I said to myself, "Just keep him for now and stick to your original plan. You can write him out in your next draft." And then Gath developed into something more than just comic relief. He became the big brother of the group; the heart and good conscience. He was protective of them and made sure everyone was safe. I don't think I was being very subtle with what was going to happen when Gath insisted he stayed in the back, but I don't think it needs to be. Gath's story was always going to end in tragedy, but I wasn't expecting it to hurt so much.

Carth's death, by far, I cried the most for. Literally as soon as I hit ctrl+enter to start the next chapter, tears fell, and they kept falling for a good couple minutes. Much like Gath, I didn't expect for Carth to develop as a character as much as he did. In the chapters leading up to the end, you got to see just how many cracks truly lay around his soul and how much he genuinely cared for his team. He began acknowledging them as his friends, and he made sure they were ok—physically and mentally. Seeing him begin to love Nagan as a friend felt the most rewarding, and I really did stab myself in the heart with the line, "Maybe if we had more time and less pride, we could've been friends." It just shows that Carth, even though he internally called them friends, he still felt unworthy to truly claim the title.

Carth was a broken character from the start. It's been implied (and I am now confirming) that his older brother, Valrin, had major depression, and I'm also confirming that Carth was depressed as well. He just hid it better due to all the expectations set upon him, and he saw how Valrin was treated before Meixong whisked him away. I related so much to this, and I may have been self-projecting that onto Carth while writing him. Carth, I also realized, is probably the one character I could rewrite the whole story in their perspective, and it could still be an entire book. It would be mainly about the events of Warfire, but it still would bring a completely different perspective and could honestly bring a lot to the series. Nagan's pov, I'll admit, is much narrower than I wanted and is almost single minded when it comes to making decisions. Carth, on the other hand, I feel like it would be wider and take in what's going on around him. Even if Carth is only a couple years older than Nagan, he's still more mature and has lost more of his egocentricity. Maybe I will write short snippets of previous events—all in Carth's pov—but unfortunately, that, too, will be cut short.

Fai's death, I was the most conflicted about. I can't fully explain why I ultimately did it since that would spoil a bit of the next book, but I will say this: The torch has been passed on once again. For each book, I've noticed, Nagan has gained a different mentor. First was Dagmire, but he ultimately proved to be indulgent and then negligent, and then Fai picked up the pieces. As who will be Nagan's next mentor, that's still to be revealed.

Another wrench that was thrown into the mix was &?*$ Meixong. I did not mean for that to happen. The chemistry was unbelievable, and I will readily admit it almost swayed me into keeping Fai alive. I wanted to see where the two of them would go. But the outline had already been written. I still can't say much, but trust me when I say the events of the third book would not happen if Fai was still alive.

Meixong wasn't even supposed to exist in the first place! If anything, Meixong was almost a joke character I threw in because as an introduction activity, I described myself through Nagan's eyes. Am I admitting that I literally self-wrote myself into the Broken Time Series? Yes. Yes I am. Maddoxx → Meixong. Fai calls them "Ei" and I commonly get referred to as "E." I've since separated myself from Meixong, making them their own character (hence why I gave them the name Hark for their Tarkon name), but they still have a lot of my mannerisms. Except that I exude more manic/anxious energy than them.

Gosh, this series means so much to me. Sometimes I feel sad that it'll end someday, but then I remember this is just the first draft. There's so much I get to come back to once the final book is finished. And I'll probably get to improve and edit it over and over again, until it's good enough to hold it as a real book in my own hands. It's a complete mess right now, especially since I pretty much started my writing "career" on Nagan | Book One. I've learned so much since then, and so much has happened. We're officially half-way through the series, now!

Everything about this has just been such an amazing journey for me, and hopefully it's been the same for you guys. The third book is already underway (I actually wrote a large portion of it during Nanowrimo, just over 21k words before carpal tunnel set in), but I may wait a bit before beginning to publish it. I want to keep to the weekly schedule, but in order for me to do that, I need a substantial backlog of chapters. I want at least 20 chapters written ahead of time so that gives me time to write the rest of it. But I won't bore you with further calculations on how I hope to achieve this. I also kinda want to work on another book to avoid getting burnt out in the middle like what happened for Warfire.

Anyway, thank you all for reading and making it to the end of Warfire! And I hope you still like this story enough to keep reading...I eagerly await the "everyone lives/nobody dies" tag on a fanfic XD

See you in the next book!