Once Upon a Time… (circa 2013) I wrote a book called “A Reason to be Brave”. I really had no clue what I was doing. I had just discovered Steampunk, had written several ghost story/supernatural fiction novels, and had not even considered publishing yet. Despite this, I borrowed a lyric for my title (from the Josh Groban song with which I was obsessed at the time) created a cast of unlikely characters and set sail into the Aether in an airship called the Surly Curmudgeon. My original cast of characters started out rather simply structured – innocent sixteen-year-old Theodosia Maundy, eighteen-year-old New Asia aristocrat Edward Than Nguyen Kelso, and enigmatic (and dramatic) Jacob Damascus. The book was meant to be their story. And it was. It still is. And yet… as it was being written, two of the second tier characters – rather than coming in, saying their lines, and retreating backstage as intended – began instead to rise to the fore. Before I knew it, both of these rascals had ceased to be second tier characters at all. The next thing I knew, Arrington Pentecost had informed me that he was nobody’s second tier character, and Algernon Vaudeville was renegotiating his contract and demanding a bigger dressing room. Both of them were right. When I finally finished writing that book (a nearly 1000 page tome that is now being rewritten into two books so it won’t break anybody’s coffee table) I sat and stared at those two characters (and they stared back at me) and I realized that there was so much story yet to be told about them. What happened after the book I had just written, probably, but what happened before that book for certain. So many things had been alluded to, referenced, referred to as history, and yet there were no books written to tell those parts of the story. So, I set that book on the metaphorical shelf, asked it to wait (patiently if possible), and I rewound the clock to where the story truly began, and that is how the Pentecost Chronicles came to be. Seven Pentecost novels later, it is finally time for this part of the story to be told. Now – as originally intended – the book belongs to Theo and Kelso and Damascus, as it has from the very beginning. Rather than rewriting it as the eighth and ninth books in the Pentecost Chronicles, I am instead launching the next two books as the first volumes in the Damascus Road series – two books in which Pentecost and Vaudeville still play a major role, and for which the seven books in the Pentecost Chronicles have already set the stage. Moving forward, the new series will follow the exploits of Jacob Damascus and will include some other
characters from the Pentecost books as well as from these first two books in the Damascus series. I hope you will join us on the adventure!
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