If you’ve read Desperate Action, Survival, and Dead End, you’ll notice they are part of a trilogy called “The Traveler Trilogy.” This may not make sense unless you’ve followed this blog for some time and have an incredible memory regarding my earlier posts. If you search this blog for “Traveler,” you’ll run into one of my earliest posts: The Traveler. It’s a short post about a short story. Of course, you can avoid all that searching and reading and just read this post, where I’ll catch you up!

History

Way back in 2020, after I published my first book and learned how to be an author (after my first book, I knew how to create the book, run the business, and advertise), I did what every author does… I wrote a second book. Yeah, I’m sure you didn’t see that coming.

My second book was titled Doorway. If you search on Amazon, you will not find the book because it was never published. I have kept the slot open in my Amazon control panel. Check this out:

As you can see, the last time I modified or uploaded a draft manuscript was on June 8th of 2020. The reason the book was never published was that I ran into a roadblock with the story. It didn’t really come out the way I had envisioned, and the limited number of people who read it were not thrilled with it. In fact, Act I and Act II just dragged. That was my opinion, as well as others, instead of rewriting it a third time (My first attempt was a manuscript that was technically a short story or maybe a novella, so I rewrote it).

I leave the placeholder there just to remind me that I have an unfinished book that someday… maybe I’ll rewrite it a third time. I’ll have to put my creative hat on and come up with a better story based on the basics of what that story is supposed to tell.

Back to The Traveler…

After being morally destroyed by the fact that my second novel was an utter failure, I decided to practice with a short story. That’s where Traveler 235 came from.

Sometime in the future, scientists solved all the problems enabling the construction of a robotic craft to travel to the nearest stars. Oh, it still took 44 years (the shortest flight) to get from Earth to Alpha Centauri, but at least they could do it. The short story is about one of the hundreds of probes sent out. This one was named Traveler 235. The probe has intelligence and talks about his adventure when he arrives at his destination. Then, the probe discovers that there is intelligent life on planets orbiting the star. Of course, it gets better, and there’s an ominous ending.

That short story sat out there for years. I had intended to write an alien invasion series right after that short story but then segued into the MacKenzie Steele series (starting with short stories and ending with three novels). I didn’t like the way the series of books was going (I was still fleshing out the stories of each book as well as writing the first book). I just didn’t have enough experience with book series.

Eventually, I came back after the Daphne Blazefire series (the first five books). Then, I wrote Desperate Action. It was one of my first books written after I learned about depth. Desperate Action is based upon the discoveries from the Traveler series of robotic probes. In fact, the prologue of Desperate Action has a few paragraphs about this.

The prologue contains a scene where Ensign Winters is on his first ship, and the fleet encounters the aliens as they arrive for the first time. That’s when they discover that the craft that comes out of a portal near the asteroid belt can accelerate at a speed too fast for the human body to survive. They couldn’t catch the first probes that came through, and those probes attacked Earth. Then the book moves right into chapter 1, where Ensign Wintesr is now Commander Winters, Earth is devastated, and the robotic craft continue to come through the same portal on precise intervals.

That leaves a section of history where Earth fights the initial invasion. There are a few scenes in the trilogy that hint at how badly Earth had been attacked, but no story about that has been written. Someday, I might return to this story and write a few extra books to fill in the story. There is certainly room for some exciting stories on those battles.

There is also an open ending in this trilogy (if you’ve read the books, you still might not realize it). I would like to write another trilogy, someday, of what happens after Dead End. At this time, I don’t have immediate plans to write any more books in this series. Of course, that could change if there are a lot of interested readers (you can add a comment to this page).

And now you know the history of where The Traveler Trilogy’s name came from.