When I released Verdant Pioneers, the second book of the Verdant series, I found myself at a crossroads: After 20 years of effort, writing and self-publishing had not produced the sales results I'd hoped for.  So I decided it was time to step away from writing and self-publishing, spend some time on other pursuits, and maybe return to it in the future.

Fast-forward to 2024, and the state of the book industry hadn't changed much from my perspective: Marketing was still expensive and difficult, and the chances of successfully releasing a new book (assuming I had time to actually write one) were slim.  Coupled with the stresses of daily life, mainly, trying to prepare for an imminent retirement from government service, and I was still pushing the whole books thing further and further into my rear view mirror.  In truth, I found myself in less and less of a mood to write for an apparently non-caring—hell, pretty much non-existent—audience.

But in 2025, I found myself thinking a lot about my unfinished Verdant series, and realized I had a desire to put a cap on it.  There was also the realization that a final Verdant book would be no less than my 20th product to be copywritten and on file at the Library of Congress... at the time, that potential milestone was the best incentive to write that I had.  So I started taking down notes about what might have happened to the city-satellite and its inhabitants over the last year, with the hope of finding the germ of a story to complete the series.

The thing about science fiction is that as today's science develops, it can color the view into the future; and I was finding plenty of new material and scientific developments that I could incorporate into a sequel.  But what I didn't have, in all that science, was a real finale to the series: What would be the final fate of Verdant, and of Earth for that matter, after an odyssey that was kicked off by the eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera?

That took a lot more work, because I wanted an ending worth... well, ending a 3-book saga.  I knew I didn't want to tie up the series with something typical, even though there might be plenty of readers who would want and expect an ending typical of a generic sci-fi saga—you know, aliens, space battles, disasters and melodrama galore.  This needed to be an ending worth reading, but also one that sounded like an ending that came from me, not just what you'd expect from a typical streaming network production, or from a dollar comic book. 

Eventually I realized what the overall message of the book was going to be.  I knew the book would have a mix of familiar characters from the first two books, plus a few new characters befitting the new story.  I also wanted the story to take advantage of the various possibilities that were created by Verdant's newfound purpose.  I just had to figure out how to get my story there.  

Assembling my notes and organizing story beats, from which I could then form into a story outline, turned out to be a few months of a process.  Okay, most of a year of process before I could put a single word into the manuscript.  But I didn't want to leave any holes in the narrative, and I wanted the ending to be solid, so I took the time.  I mean, I just needed to finish the book and get it copywritten before I met some proverbially-untimely end.  No pressure.

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