Joseph Nassise

This past weekend I said goodbye to four friends that I’ve known for some time. We’ve gone through a lot together; the deaths of loved ones, work-related problems, outside influences that tried to hurt us, that didn’t have our best interests at heart. Sometimes I loved them like brothers. At other times, I wanted to kill them and I spent many an evening developing the most deliciously cruel and bizarre ways to do so.

The thing is, we’d just grown apart. Distant. Our lives no longer intersected at some many points on the dial. Dare I say that maybe we’d even grown a bit bored with each other? We parted as friends, and will probably visit each other now and again, but I think it was plain for all of us that a phase of our lives had come to an end.

And that was okay.

Really.

I can hear you all now. Leave the Dr. Phil stuff to the co-called professionals and get back to talking about writing, right?

But you see, I am talking about writing. This weekend I finally completed A TEAR IN THE SKY, the third and final book in my Templar Chronicles trilogy.

I came up with the idea of a series about modern Templar knights defending mankind from the supernatural on behalf of the Vatican a few years ago. Book one, HERETIC, was published by Pocket Books in October of 2005. The plan to write four books was scaled back to a trilogy at my foreign publisher’s request in late 2006. Book two, A SCREAM OF ANGELS, was written between September 2006 and January 2007. I dove into book three immediately thereafter (namely because I had been late turning in SCREAM and I needed to meet my deadline for TEAR.)

So for the last nine months straight, and off and on for some time before that, my focus has been almost entirely on the exploits of this group of warriors.

It can be comforting writing about the same characters. You know who they are. You know what they want. You know their motivations and their fears and their idiosyncrasies. But it can also be creatively stifling, for when you sit down to write you realize that you are going to be writing about them again. Your very familiarity with them can become problematic, as it no longer seems to stretch you creatively. It no longer holds the same challenges or the same feeling of discovery that working on a new project with new characters often can.

I’ve greatly enjoyed telling the story of Knight Commander Cade Williams and his rough-and-tumble group of warriors known as the Echo Team. But I’m not going to complain as I put them away on the back shelf of my mind for awhile and move onto to something new.

It’s time to tell the story of Special Agent Mitchell Sloane and the serial killer known as the Inquisitor.

Time to journey alongside Joshua Gideon as he struggles to stop the apocalypse he started by reading the forbidden Book of Coming Sorrows.

Time to walk in the shoes of Jeremiah Hunt, the man who gave up his eyes in order to see more clearly, as he searches for his missing daughter, Elizabeth.

These are the stories that interest me now, the tales that are clamoring to be told. And they deserve my time and attention. (And I sure as heck don’t want to piss off my muse!)

I’m sure I’ll come back and visit Cade at some point. But for now, it’s time to say goodbye.

Whoever it was that said “parting is such sweet sorrow” only got it half right.