I turned off the moderation of comments on this blog. A long time back, I had difficulty keeping up with spammers. They seem to come to new blogs and post their links all over the place. I use a spam detector on my blogs, but even those miss some spammers. Anyway, one of the spamming trends is that after a while, they stop posting. Probably because I ended up turning on the moderation setting (that means users can post, but I have to come out and click the accept button for the post to show, which is kind of annoying for the poster). It’s been some time (like years) since I’ve seen any spammers, so I decided to open up to anyone who wants to post anything. I’ll come out and moderate any spam posts if I have to (like with the delete button).

A Little Daphne Blazefire History…

As if those who visit this site haven’t heard about the Daphne series and its origins already… but for those who don’t visit this site regularly (or are on Facebook reading this for the first time), I wanted to give a short history.

Waaay, back in January 2022, I was working on the first book of the Escape from the Abyss series (later named The Archons). I wrote about 8,500 words of the first draft of that book (archived now). I knew at that time I didn’t have the skills I needed to pull off a series as large as that one. Even now, I look back and realize I would have done things a lot differently using the writing knowledge I have now. Of course, I’m always learning new techniques, but that’s for another day.

Anyway, I pulled out a writing prompt with the intention of writing a short story (you know, like maybe 2-4,000 words, max). That’s where Novis Terminal came from. I started writing that story, and before I knew it, I was already 20,000 words into it and about halfway done. I also had RUSTY and Daphne, who were great characters that I could see having many adventures. That prompted me to backburner the Abyss series and focus on Daphne Chronicles. After I published Novis Terminal, I jumped right into Dangerous Cargo. In fact, I was editing Novis Terminal when I started the rough draft of Dangerous Cargo. During this time, I took courses on depth of scenes, character depth, tags, and other techniques. I started running Ads for the Daphne Chronicles right away and tracked book performance for each one. It didn’t take long to realize that my skill levels were not up to par to make money off those books. Don’t get me wrong, the stories are great, but I could do so much more with them today. To demonstrate that, I wrote RUSTY’s Memories, which was a storyline that I had left hanging from the original series anyway. Let’s face it: if you’re a reader like me, you probably hate it when a story thread is never completed.

If you look at the publish dates of each book, you’ll see that Supercomputer was published in September of 2022, and I just published RUSTY’s Memories in December of 2024. A two-year gap between. Of course, I wrote the Abyss series, plus The Traveler Trilogy, during that time. But the reason I’m advertising RUSTY’s Memories is to see how it performs. And, boy, does it. It’s getting a ton of KU reads (thanks to all the readers who are reading that book).

Daphne’s Future

After reading about the history (which came out longer than I anticipated), you’re probably thinking that Daphne is a dead series. As in: no more books.

Nope. Not at all.

In fact, I already ordered the cover for the next book in the series, which will be titled Shadows in the Bloodline. This story is based on another thread that appears in many of the books in the series. Plus, I put a gigantic hook at the end of RUSTY’s Memories, so I’m committed. It’s gonna happen.

But then what? Well, there are some minor threads I’ve left in other books that I can follow through on. I could leave them hanging since they are minor, but I actually have other possible stories that could be written for that series. Right now, I have 16 possible stories (that means 10 new stories). I’m contemplating the end of this series with the seventh book and starting a new series like a spin-off. That way, I can advertise the first book of the spin-off series and get people into the series from the beginning.

There are other options available to me. One option, which is pretty radical, would be to rewrite the first five books and bring their stories up to the standard of RUSTY’s Memories. That would “fix” the read-through problem the series suffers from today. If I do that, I’d have to increment the edition number and unpublish the existing books as I publish the updated books (not to mention re-filing for copyright, etc.). Something I’ve never tried before. Novis Terminal is critical because it’s the origin story. It tells the story of Daphne purchasing her ship and starting her business. It also reveals the discovery of RUSTY. Other parts of the story, as well as characters that appear in future stories, are also critical. However, I have a lot of flexibility over the scenes themselves. If I rewrote that book, it would undoubtedly end up as a 70k word book instead of a 42k word book, mainly because of the addition of scene and character depth. But I’d also probably twist the story further. I’m tempted to try this for the first book, only to see what happens.

The second book, Dangerous Cargo, is a good story on its own. It needs some extra depth, but I really like the characters introduced in that story. I’d also twist the story a bit more. The midpoint needs to have a much more shocking reveal. But that book came out pretty good as is.

There were a couple of new characters introduced in the Nav Computer. In fact, those characters appear in the last two books, so they would have to be introduced there. Just adding depth would probably help Nav Computer, but I would be tempted to twist the story more. Again, the mid-point reveal (a technique I didn’t understand very well when I wrote this series) would have to have a little more punch. Or maybe, just a better build-up. I really liked that story, but the comments indicate readers were not too crazy about it. I haven’t re-read the story in some time, so I’m betting there’s a part that drags (I would certainly cut scenes that drag).

The story where Daphne is stranded on an ice planet… Stolen Property, yeah, that needs a bigger emotional punch. In my head, the story was supposed to have more of a gut twist, but I didn’t have the character depth-writing skills to pull it off.

Then there is Supercomputer. That story came out really good. It could probably use some depth, like the other four stories, but the overall plot is great. I would probably put a little more into the characters to make it more emotional. It feels as though I just wrote that book a month ago, but alas, it’s been more than two years.

As you can guess, rewriting the first five books would be a lot of work. It would delay any new books I might write in the future, and I can’t even think about starting such a project until I’m done with Shadows. That book will not start until I’m done with the five-book Q series (a cozy mystery series written under my pen name, Elliot Droit). My schedule (which can change) shows the first week of May when I publish the last Q series book.

If you have any comments about the Daphne series, go put them in this post. I’d love to hear your opinions.

I’ll probably re-read the books just to refresh my mind. I’ll have to have a notepad ready so I can record exactly what bugs me as I read the stories. In the author biz, it’s a no-no to rewrite books, but sometimes it’s done. The reason why most people don’t re-write is due to the fact that there are always an unlimited number of possible books to write. Therefore, most authors just move on. The Daphne series seems to have good bones and a lot of great characters, so I’m tempted to go for it.