Well, what are you to say? These things just happen.
At the time that you are reading this, the complete series, The Dark Corner, has been released in one volume and is on every major retailer online. At the bottom is the subtitle “Featuring The Makarios Cadre”. I am telling you now that they have been an unexpected pregnancy in the RIU. Not only were they an unexpected pregnancy but they are giving me some pretty potent disciplinary issues.
Let me explain myself.
When I first embarked on this journey to be a self-published author, I had a plan. That plan was to release a series of short stories that I had written back in the late 1980s early 1990s (okay, now just dated myself). They needed to go through extensive editing and there was one element that was missing. The fact that they were short stories, novelettes, and novellas posed a little bit of a problem.
You see, short stories don’t sell but short stories are a great way to garner visibility for your work. What I had seen online is that series were what people wanted and — to be quite frank — it’s what I wanted to write. My dilemma was that each one of the stories was standalone. So I had to come up with a way to make it a series. Enter the Makarios Cadre.
I had to sit down and weave an underlying story thread that connected all of those stories together. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to do that until I had an exchange with another writer online who, through a discussion prompted me to develop The Dark Corner the way that it is today. Now, I’m positive that she had no idea that she had been a catalyst for the series and I should probably write her and thank her for that. The only problem is that it was in direct contradiction of her position in what we were speaking of. That is to say, I wrote it as a response to what she was writing. So I may hold off on that.
Nevertheless, new heroes and villains had to be created and I also wanted them to fit into my overall world and everything that was going on in it. So Sebastian, Amanda, and Tyler were born as out of time. Unexpected but out of necessity.
Now my original intent was to write the series and that would be the end of it and everything in the series. The series was simply an introduction to my writing and an introduction to my world. But something happened. Even before the series was completed, these children that were given to me started back talking something fierce. We began to argue. A lot. Now that I had let them out, they didn’t want to go back in. They kept reminding of some things and I kept giving them reasons — or at least I thought they were reasons — why they had to be silent. They didn’t buy it. I had created a monster and it wanted to be fed. Since they wouldn’t take ‘No’ for an answer, we came to a compromise: wait. They agreed though they were not happy, but I gave them assurances that their story would be told.
So what that means is that the Makarios Cadre will return in their own series. We’ll get deeper into their backgrounds and the organization that they work for, the Povidere Cabal. How I’m going to complete all of this, only the good Lord knows. But He’s the One giving it to me so He’ll be the One giving me the ability to complete it all.
So, the Makarios Cadre wanted me to tell you all, in the words of Arnold Swartzeneggar . . . I’ll be back.
