Post by johnurbancik on Dec 4, 2022 16:12:15 GMT
I started writing the first DarkWalker novel around 2002. I think I completed the first draft in 2003. It was intended to be a standalone horror novel with a little bit of everything: vampires, demons, werewolves, ogres, Lovecraftian creatures rising out of Lake Eola in Orlando, Florida.
I sold it some years later as part of a series to EvilEye, who published the original novel in 2012.
At first, I thought the second novel would be called HellWalker, and the third maybe StreetWalker, but the publisher pushed back against that and rightly so.
Though I delivered the second novel before the first was ever published, nothing happened. The publisher moved in different directions and eventually closed, releasing all rights back to me. I received this news at an early Scares that Care.
I thought the best thing I could do was start at the beginning. I re-revised the first novel, and the second, and both were published through DarkFluidity in early 2018 as I finished writing the third and fourth novels in the series.
The first four books were all published in 2018. My partner, Mary, did the icons on the first four covers.
She wanted to do the others, but in early 2019 she was diagnosed with cancer and didn't survive the summer. Writing the books was delayed. Everything in my life was delayed.
In 2020, under the blanket of Covid and locked away in my sister's house in Florida, I wrote books five and six to finish the series. Mary's college friend Rich did the icons for the last two books, and the last two books of the series were published.