The Soul Prophecies is five-years-old this month.
The journey began with Anomaly, an idea I had been working on for over three years and was finally released in January 2016. The series has become my life since leaving university. I had so many science ideas breathing life into the premise and the book was personal to me, often soul-searching to write. It seems a cliché to say the book wrote itself, it didn’t, but there was something in the universe guiding my direction while writing the book and opening up fresh ways of observing life around me.
It was never meant to be a series initially but the more the characters became part of my life, the more their backstories became important to me. Hidden Variables was the prequel to Anomaly, telling Sophia Leto’s story. It was an idea that came to me during the writing of Anomaly and was released in April 2018.
The two books were then rewritten for a deluxe version, Another Path, altering the story a little as I understood more about what happened to Ahrl’s world and needed to nudge the reader deeper down the rabbit hole of his past, and how our planet could suffer the same fate as Iyeeka. Another Path was released in April 2019 and Lost Frequencies, Ahrl’s story, in November 2019.
The series concluded in November 2020 with the release of Quantum Messenger. A book which explores the natural progression of the soul from alien, then human, to artificial intelligence. The book ties back to Anomaly to form an infinity loop, so it can be read as the first book in the series, even though it’s the last.
The paperback version of Anomaly has now been deleted, although Amazon has it for sale at £35. I’ve reread the eBook version again this week, which has the original pesky errors corrected – there’s always a few that skip the net during the first edition of all books, annoying as it is – and I’m still proud of it. There are some continuity niggles with it now that I know how the series unfolds, which were taken out in the Another Path version but there’s still something in the sentiment of the book that I hold close to my heart and still live by the principles Kyle and Alice presented to me while writing it.
It’s been much more difficult to move on from the series than I thought it would be. I have dozens of ideas and have started writing and researching three different books while I identify the direction I travel hereon in. One is a sci-fi, with a concept I’m unaware has been done before; another is an historical fiction exploring the mental health of a soldier post-war; and another a fantasy in the style of Ursula K. Le Guin or Christelle Davos. I’m not sure which will win at this stage as I love all the ideas but I do enjoy reading fantasy, so I’m leaning in that direction.
Time will tell.
If I have written another four books in the next five years, I will have accomplished something pretty remarkable.