Deep in Book Five, and the Earlier Books Won't Let Me Go
Tracy's World - Weekend Edition
This has been a crazy writing week, full of unexpected twists, turns, and insights.
So, I want to share what's been happening...
I'm deep in the drafting of Book Five: The Missing Sister. And I mean deep — the kind of deep where you catch yourself doing the mental math of a fictional timeline while you're supposed to be grocery shopping. You know the feeling if you've ever been truly lost in a story, either writing one or reading one.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about writing a long series: somewhere around book four or five, if you've built a solid foundation under the story, bits start to resurface and intertwine in unexpected ways. The early books begin reaching forward and grabbing your attention. Threads you wove in almost instinctively — a detail here, a throwaway line there, a character introduced for one purpose who evolves into a completely different one — those things start showing up and announcing themselves.
That's been happening to me with The Missing Sister. And it's kind of incredible.
I'll be writing a scene and realize that something I wrote in Book Three — sometimes a single sentence, sometimes a conversation I thought was simply character texture — becomes the foundation for what I'm building right now in Book Five. And then I'll follow that thread backward through The Kidnapping King (Now, The Stolen Heir), or through The Magical Legacy, even into Angel Touched — and I'm finding it there too, already in place, pointing exactly where I needed it to point.
It's a strange and humbling experience. Like discovering that past-you was smarter than you realized.
Angel Touched, in particular, is surprising me. When I wrote that story, I only did it because readers kept asking me what happened to Nathaniel. So, I knew it was important — I knew Nathaniel's story mattered to this universe in ways I couldn't fully articulate yet. What I didn't fully appreciate until right now, drafting Book Five, is how specifically his story matters. The threads woven into that novella — Ethan's reach across time and space, Valdis's long game, the nature of a certain mark on a certain boy's arm — are not background color. They are load-bearing walls.
I can't tell you much more than that without spoiling things I very much want you to experience fresh. But I will tell you this: if you haven't read Angel Touched yet, read it before Book Five comes out. Trust me on that one.
What I can tell you is that writing this book has confirmed something I've always hoped was true about this series — that it would mean something more than just entertainment. That the mythology holds. That the questions the early books raise get answered at the level of story, not just explanation — meaning you'll feel the answer before you can put it into words.
There's a particular character whose role in all of this has genuinely moved me, even as the author. Someone whose single, unremarkable act of kindness — performed long before the events of Book One, without any understanding of what she was or what she carried — turns out to be one of the most important moments in the entire series. Past-me planted that seed without fully knowing what it would grow into.
Present-me is deeply grateful she did.
The Missing Sister is shaping up to be the book where everything that's been quietly building over the years finally comes together. This isn't the ending — not by a long shot! We still have Books Six and Seven (and do you know about the follow-up series: Jack and the Immortals? Book One: The Dark Matriarch, is already in the works!), and honestly, this universe has stories in it I haven't even fully imagined yet. But the moment where the reader looks back at everything they've read and thinks: Oh. It was always going in this direction. How did I not see it?
That's what I'm writing right now. And I couldn't be more excited to put it in your hands.
If you're just discovering this series — or if you know someone who would love it — the best place to start is the Jack Mac Paidin Series Box Set #1 (Books 1-3). It's the foundation everything else is built on, and trust me when I say that foundation matters more than you know.
More soon. Thanks for being on this journey with me.
— Tracy