Author Commentary on the Alex Verus Series

(Note: This is a master post that functions as an index.  For the links to the individual commentaries for each book, scroll to the bottom.)

As I’m writing this, it’s April 2021, and the Alex Verus series is slowly drawing to an end.  The final book in the series, Risen, is currently at its copy-edits stage, and will be published in eight months.  So with the endpoint of the series coming steadily nearer, I thought it might be fun to write a retrospective on the books.

Originally I was going to do 1 blog post per “trilogy”, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I had more than enough to say to fill up 1 post per book, so that’s how I’m going to do it.  After all, each of these books represents something like 1 year of my life – a lot happened over each of them!

You can think of these posts as “author commentaries” or as a series of Author’s Notes.  They’ll contain background information on the book, titbits of information about how it was written or what I was intending, and my thoughts on the book in hindsight.  They’ll also include some context about what was happening in my life when I wrote it, since (especially for the first three) that actually had quite a big influence over how the series turned out.

Since I put up 1 post a week on this blog and there are 12 books in the Alex Verus series, this is going to be a long project!  It’d take a minimum of 3 months even if I just wrote all of these posts back to back.  And I won’t be writing them back to back – there’ll be other posts mixed in about topics like Terra Invicta (the computer game I’m working on), Alex Verus short stories (which I’m still planning on doing), and the new series I’m writing notes for, plus the occasional Ask Luna.  So this is probably going to run for something like 6 months total, and by the time I get up to writing the commentary for Risen, I’m expecting Risen to be right on the verge of release.  So this’ll also work as a kind of recap leading up to book 12.

SPOILER WARNING:  For obvious reasons, the author commentary for each book will contain spoilers for that book, for all earlier books in the series, and occasional spoilers for future books too.  Consider yourself warned!

Well, with that out of the way, let’s get going!  The links below will be filled in as I write the posts.  The first will be a “prelude” to the series, explaining how the Alex Verus world came to exist as it did and why it got changed so drastically (it’ll make sense once you read it).  That’ll be released next week, on April 9th.  After that I’ll get going on the author commentaries for the books in the series, beginning with Fated.

Author Commentary on Alex Verus #0 – Prelude
Author Commentary on Alex Verus #1 – Fated
Author Commentary on Alex Verus #2 – Cursed
Author Commentary on Alex Verus #3 – Taken
Author Commentary on Alex Verus #3.5 – Interlude
Author Commentary on Alex Verus #4 – Chosen
Author Commentary on Alex Verus #5 – Hidden
Author Commentary on Alex Verus #6 – Veiled
Author Commentary on Alex Verus #7 – Burned
Author Commentary on Alex Verus #8 – Bound
Author Commentary on Alex Verus #9 – Marked
Author Commentary on Alex Verus #9.5 – Endgame
Author Commentary on Alex Verus #10 – Fallen
Author Commentary on Alex Verus #11 – Forged
Author Commentary on Alex Verus #12 – Risen (Part 1)
Author Commentary on Alex Verus #12.5 – Risen (Part 2)