It could have been ten years worth of stories-maybe ten novels about Sam and Mila that I would never write. It will so sound very odd, but I mourned those lost years.
What had happened between them? Were they still working together? Were they estranged? How had they grown and changed in those ten years? All of that felt like a potential decade of adventure and character development I was just walking away from.
I was simultaneously passing up ten years of stories with Sam and his (sometimes) espionage partner, Mila, who was a central character to the series. I wanted Daniel to be his own character, and grow past being a toddler that his father constantly worried about.ĭoing this forward leap came at a price, though. All while starting to figure out who he is on his own. If I jumped ahead ten years from the end of that book, Daniel would be entering those entertaining teenaged years, in middle school, maybe at the age to be suspicious of his father’s absences, or his father returning from a “business trip” with a broken arm, or asking questions about what his mother was really like. Sam needed emotional stakes tied to his suburban life and that was the risk that his son, Daniel, might learn the truth about their lives-that his father is, in reality, an intelligence operative going on incredibly dangerous missions and that his mother didn’t die when he was a baby. I realized I could do that with Sam-single dad must deal with the twin terrors of espionage and raising a teenager – but I felt for it to work optimally, I’d need to take a jump forward in time. The kindly chemistry teacher in Breaking Bad trying to provide for his family before he dies of cancer transforms into a ruthless kingpin. The nice couple next door in The Americans who own a travel agency are highly trained KGB agents waging a dangerous, secret war on our soil.
#Age of conan map sizew serial#
The soft-spoken forensic expert in Dexter is a serial killer who hunts other killers. This is our age of duality, where so many characters have a hidden life behind normalcy and comfort. Father and son were living in New Orleans, a quiet life when Sam wasn’t spying or fixing problems or stealing secrets.īut quiet lives don’t stay quiet, not in modern American stories, especially on television. His son Daniel was a toddler, the center of his world, but not a character who could feature realistically in many scenes. At the end of The First Order, the fifth Sam book, Sam had gone to work for a back-corner intel group where misfits (or those who had trouble with rules, such as Sam) ended up, doing the kinds of missions that could be more easily disavowed than if taken on by the traditional agencies and operatives. Not comparing myself to them, of course, but Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Holmes and then brought him back to life Josephine Tey gave Inspector Alan Grant two long rests (from 1929-1936 and then again until 1948) John le Carré started off with espionage chief George Smiley in his first two novels in the early 1960s and gave him a break as a main protagonist until bringing him back in 1974, superbly, with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Other authors have taken breaks with characters. So I kept writing, and Sam existed in a limbo in the back corner of my brain. And my publisher liked me writing standalones to help pull in new readers. I kept wanting to go back to writing the next Sam but no idea seemed right for his world. And those novels didn’t touch on spies or intel or the high-octane action that marked the Sam Capra books. My next four novels were all standalone psychological thrillers, centered on suburban families dealing with dark, deep secrets that upended their perfect, Facebook-curated lives.
#Age of conan map sizew series#
After writing the fifth Sam Capra novel-a series about a young single father and espionage operative who had his share of personal life crises over the course of the books-I was ready for a break.
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