Beyond the Pale | Special Episode
It’s done.
After more than two decades — a garage apartment in the early 2000s, two deployments to Iraq, a back injury, a cross-country move, a divorce, the death of my father, a catastrophic data loss, and somewhere north of a million written words — The Seven Signs is complete.
Book seven, The Heart of Ruin, is out now. And this episode isn’t a normal one. There’s no historical story this week. No dark corner of history to drag you into. This week, the story is the story — the one behind the series. Consider it an extended Afterword.
Where It Started
It started as a joke. Or close to one.
A friend showed up with a funny story he’d written — a goofy thing where everybody in the friend group was a character. People laughed. And something clicked in the brain of a young guy who had never thought of himself as a writer. He was a musician. He wrote songs. But he loved to read, and so with the particular hubris that only the very young can summon, he sat down at a borrowed PC — big plastic box, CRT monitor, the whole deal — and decided he was going to write a novel.
That young man was me. That novel became The Seven Signs.
The early version was a very different animal. Lighter. Jauntier. Classic good-versus-evil fantasy, warriors cutting through hordes of enemies without breaking a sweat. There was even a whole chapter about a polyamorous island culture that served absolutely no narrative purpose whatsoever. (Any editor reading this: yes, I know.)
The Army, Iraq, and the Book That Changed
Then 9/11 happened. I signed up.
I went to Germany, then Iraq, then back to Germany, then Iraq again. That second deployment — Alpha Company 2/3, UH-60 crew chief, machine gunner — was one of the defining experiences of my life. I flew generals, celebrities, infantry guys, VIPs, reporters. I heard six radios at once. I saw the war from the air and from the ground, from the lowest private to the highest brass. I flew Robin Williams to a base. I saw how the messaging changed depending on who was in the helicopter.
It is very hard not to feel a little cynical after all that.
And it was during that second deployment, after a particularly brutal day — small arms fire, bullet holes in the drive shaft, a shredded tail rotor, a day and a half of repairs — that I sat down in my two-man trailer, opened my laptop, pulled up Microsoft Word, and read back over what I had written.
It didn’t reflect who I was anymore. Not even close.
So I rewrote everything. Characters were cut. The tone darkened. And the story started asking harder questions — not just who deserves great power, but what it costs. What revenge actually does to a person. Whether redemption is even real.
That version was the beginning of the series you know.
The Long Road to Book One
It still took years.
Life kept interrupting — as it does. I left the military in 2012. Had the standard problems trying to adapt. A bad back injury that left me barely able to walk for months. VA drugs. Surgery. Recovery. I moved across the country and started over, enrolled at University of Arizona, took English classes, Greco-Roman history, philosophy.
I also learned that an English degree mostly teaches you criticism, and quietly redirected my GI Bill.
What it did do was push me to take writing seriously as a craft. I learned to think of the series as a complete thing. I learned (slowly, painfully) about publishing, formatting, cover design, marketing. And somewhere in all of that, a vengeful person in my life destroyed a significant portion of my worldbuilding notes — character sheets, plot outlines, pages of work — some torn, some burned. Everything had to be rebuilt from scratch.
(That’s why, if you’ve ever noticed, the Sevenlander names and the names of their nations sound so different from everything else in the world. When I rebuilt the notes, I called my cousin — a dungeon master and art teacher — and asked him to invent names that felt culturally distinct from Alderak. He obliged. Fun fact.)
The first completed version of the book was called The Sentient Fire. It was 350,000 words — because I Googled how long a Wheel of Time book was, saw 350,000, and figured that was just how long fantasy novels were supposed to be. I still have the first proof copy on my shelf. What became Child of the Flames was essentially Act 1 of that book.
I self-published in 2012 because someone who read it pointed me toward indie publishing, which was just barely getting started. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t plan a long series for my debut. I didn’t plan long books. I broke every rule they tell new writers not to break.
The Death of My Father, and the Book I Almost Didn’t Finish
Book six, The Shadow of Death, came out around 2020. I started writing book seven almost immediately after — and then my father died.
I released book six while I was going through his things.
I thought I was fine. I kept going. That’s what you do, especially if you’re a guy of a certain generation and background. You keep going.
I wasn’t fine.
By the time I had written maybe 25-30% of book seven, a Google Drive accident ate the file. I was confused about what had happened, reset my backup, and lost it all the way back to the very first scene. Years of narrative choices — gone. And I was not in a good place mentally. I didn’t have the energy to retread that ground. I wasn’t even sure I could remember why I had made the choices I’d made.
So I put book seven down.
I wrote Dance of Jesters as a palate cleanser. Then a couple of novellas — Into the Storm (in the Beyond the Shadows anthology), Against the Tide (now called Still He Burns, available free). I wrote most of Through Burning Skies. I wrote chapters of a Roman historical fantasy. Six chapters of a new series called The Shattered Empire. I even wrote Wyrm Rider, the next free novella, during the final revisions of book seven.
Eventually, I came back.
What Book Seven Cost
The Heart of Ruin started as another 300,000-word leviathan. It had to be — by book seven, the story was simply that big, with that many characters, that many threads to close.
During revisions, it shed an entire novel. Roughly 30,000 words of language polish. Another 30,000 in deleted scenes. From the end of the first draft to the finished third draft, a full book’s worth of material was cut.
I revised up until the final days before release.
What the Seven Signs Actually Is
The Seven Signs is me learning to write. In public. Over twenty-plus years.
It followed me through becoming a soldier, becoming a father, becoming someone who had lost people and places and drafts and notes and whole years. Every version of who I was left something in those pages — the jokester in the garage apartment, the crew chief listening to six radios over Baghdad, the guy rebuilding his life in Tucson, the father doing it alone, the writer who almost quit more than once.
If you’ve read it, you’ve read all of those versions of me.
The banter between Dormel and D’Jenn? Real people. Real relationships. Real shit-talking I wanted to see on the page because so much fantasy dialogue felt arranged and stilted — I wanted conversations that felt like the ones I actually had.
The darkness of the middle books? A deployment and a lot of wreckage.
The themes — power and who should wield it, revenge, redemption, sacrifice? Those weren’t chosen for a series bible. They emerged from living.
Thank You
If you’re here because you’ve read the series — all of it, or even part of it — thank you. Genuinely. The readership has quieted down over the years, as it does with long series that take too long. If you’re one of the few still here, I want you to know that means something.
I’ve broken every rule they tell writers not to break. Long series for your first series. Long books. Slow release schedule. I made every mistake.
And somehow, it’s done.
There’s a lot coming next. Dragon riders versus dinosaurs. Light, shadow, space, and time magic. Ancient Roman historical fantasy. The Shattered Empire. I’m not going anywhere.
But first — this.
Links
🎉 Paperback Giveaway — Win a signed copy of Child of the Flames (Book 1): ENTER HERE
📖 Buy The Heart of Ruin (Book 7) on Kindle Unlimited: READ NOW
🎙️ Support me on Patreon and get free books: patreon.com/dwhawkins
📬 Join the mailing list and get a free novella: dwhawkins.com/join
Next week: back to the regular format, with another story from history. Until then.