Everything started with alien robots.

Alien robot, vampires, and mythology.

I used to write speculative fiction about other people's giant alien robot characters. Then I started writing original fiction about aliens in a galaxy-wide factional war. Then my aliens got fangs. Then the fanged aliens had children with super powers. Somewhere in there a pair of scheming anti-hero space commanders fell in love with each other.

I mark it as an authorial right of passage that I found sense to put it aside. 

I began writing what would become The Empty World series during one of my hiatuses from college, when I had decided Los Angeles was not for me but had not yet moved to New York. The initial inspiration was to preserve just a few characters from that previous abandoned series. No space. No aliens. No robots of any sort. But maybe fangs. These became Shade, Steven, and Blade.

Shade to me was an old man. Youthful in appearance, eccentric in style, someone with leadership potential, but who was an old soul tired of conflict and the impossibility of picking sides.

Blade to me was rebellion. Fierce, commanding, and perceived as self-serving, though to her core she believed overthrowing those in power was just.

And Steven...is pretty much the opposite of the character who inspired him. He's now a little bit inspired by my Dad (especially if he tells you the history of Xerox PARC).

My Power Trio. Maybe a Freudian Trio. Not really my OT3, but possibly a Bizarre Love Triangle.

But it wasn't a series. First it was a short story about how these characters met in New York. At the same time, I had an idea for a separate story about a girl named Ariella who found herself in a mythological realm called The Night Regions. When I combined these two concepts--existentialist vampires + supernatural entities that maintain the universe's infrastructure--I had the framework for the novel that became The Devil's Shadow.

Athen, Psyche, and Julien were among characters existing from the earliest drafts.

It still wasn't a series, yet. Not until Opium found her place. A character from the Night Regions, but with ties to Earth, which she called The Empty World. Someone able to travel between the realms and act as witness: The Looking Glass Girl. 

Shade, Blade and Steven (sometimes through his descendants) are the power players in our world, the plots usually involve something they are doing, even if from another point-of-view. The factional Angelic cold war serves as founding lore, backdrop, and source of occasional conflict. But Opium and her son, Morpheus, make the series what it is. They are like my R2-D2 and C3PO. They are in all the parts.

-Karan