This past weekend, I finished the copy edit read through of a novella titled The Head of the Serpent. It will be the first of a trilogy, and the second is already well under way.

Nothing special, you might think, except this one is different. I first had the idea for this story over thirty years ago, before I even moved to the United States. In that first iteration the story was driven by political events at the time.

As with life, there is change. What seemed new and shiny at one time soon became old news. Over the years I’ve put the idea aside, picked it up, made changes and set it down again.

In September, I picked up the idea again, shook my head at some of those early chapters and removed all the “big” world events – the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the First Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan – and tightened it down to the characters in the story. They have always been consistent, although their backgrounds have changed.

After all this time, you’d expect the story to write itself, and in many ways it did, although there were still a few incidents that took me by surprise as the story unfolded.

The goal is to finish putting the copy edits into the manuscript, and publish by the weekend. This one has been a long time in the making, but I’m pleased it’s finally here.