I can trace The Beatrice Chronicles back to 2021, but not to a neat lightning bolt moment. It was more like pressure building, a set of questions that would not leave me alone, and a sense that I wanted to write a story with sacred architecture in its bones and a moral argument at its core.

The first clear thing was not plot. It was a premise, and premises are dangerous because they keep growing.

I kept returning to the idea of a system that calls itself eternal, a system so confident in its own rightness that it cannot imagine being wrong. Then a second idea arrived, quieter but sharper: what if a single choice forces that system to change?

Not a choice made by a king or a general, but a choice made by someone who should not have that kind of power. A choice made out of love, which is often dismissed as naive until it starts breaking laws.

That was the spark. From there, the Chronicles began to assemble themselves around the consequences.

The story I thought I was writing, and the one it became

In 2021, I thought I was writing something narrower: an urban fantasy anchored in a particular place, with a strong gothic atmosphere and a tangible relic at the centre.

That version had a protagonist, Teague Blackwood. His arc was immediate and personal: duty, loyalty, survival, and the cost of carrying a burden you did not ask for.

But as I kept writing, Beatrice’s story began to dominate. Looking at their respective arcs, I realised the series was not asking for one line of tension, but two, braided together.

There was a personal arc, intimate and costly, about what it takes for an individual to choose differently and live with what that choice changes.

And there was a global arc, structural and political, about what happens when the boundaries between Heaven, Hell, and Earth begin to fail, and institutions that believed themselves eternal are forced to respond.

Once I accepted that, the Chronicles could not remain a local incident for long. Convergence is not just spectacle. It is pressure. It turns the metaphysical into the logistical. It forces bargains, exposes factions, rewrites laws, and makes people decide what they will defend when the ground shifts under them.

So the story expanded, and I had to follow it.

Why Durham mattered from the beginning

I have always been drawn to places that feel older than the people inside them. Not old as a costume, but old as a presence, the sense that the past is not finished, that it still has claims.

Durham Cathedral, and cathedral cities more generally, offer that in concentrated form. They are architectural statements about meaning. They organise a landscape. They shape a community. They embody an authority that can be comforting and intimidating in the same breath.

From the start, I wanted that stone weight atmosphere. Not as background, but as moral weather. If the story was going to argue with judgement, mercy, and redemption, it needed settings that could carry those ideas without turning them into lectures.

A cathedral can do that. It can make you feel what the story is talking about.

When I knew it was not good versus evil

Early drafts flirted with familiar shapes: angels as moral certainty, demons as the obvious threat, humans caught in the middle.

It did not take long to realise that was not what I wanted, and it was not what the premise implied.

If the story is about choice reshaping a fractured cosmos, then moral certainty cannot be a given. It has to be contested. It has to be lived, argued over, and sometimes failed.

I wanted a universe where systems exist, where decrees exist, where judgement is real. I also wanted a universe where those systems can be questioned, where decrees can be challenged, and where judgement can be confronted by mercy.

Once I admitted that, the story became more interesting and more difficult. It stopped offering easy villains and started offering pressures. It stopped offering clean sides and started offering decisions.

That shift, more than anything, is what turned a single book into a saga.

Why I am sharing this

I am sharing the process because this saga is not only a set of books. It is an ongoing construction of a universe and its argument. Readers who join the newsletter or follow the site are not just waiting for announcements. They are stepping onto the thresholds with the story.

If you have been here since the early days, thank you. If you have arrived recently, welcome. The Chronicles are built around the idea that choice matters, and that includes the choice to begin.