So, Big Man was wondering in a recent comment for one of the more recent Cleansed By Fire episodes how the Vatican and the Catholic Church could have risen to such a position of power worldwide. I answered as best I could, combining information found on some of my portal area pages and some “new” information, but as I pondered his question, it sparked a thought.

And that thought is: What if I told the story of the nearly 2,000-year period between our modern times and the year 4001, in which the novel takes place?

No, not all 2,000 years and not all at once; I’m not insane. I’m already trying to manage a huge world and a complex set of events and try to tell the story of my novel in two or three novels worth of writing. So writing prequels now (or maybe ever) for an entire 2,000 year period is not on my agenda.

However, I was thinking that from time to time, as the mood (and ideas) strike me, I could write short stories, which I would post in the portal area, that could tell the story of various notable people and events prior to the time of the novel, to give you some windows into the fictional past of my fictional future.

The first will likely be “A Tale of Two Templars” so that you can see what the early Order Templar was designed to do, before it became the quasi-militant uber-police force in my novel. I have the general plotline; just need to find the time to write it. Ironically, writing a short story right now is more daunting than writing the novel. Because the blog version of my novel is the very rough first draft of a novel, and I’m writing it in short episodes, I have more room to maneuver and even make mistakes and even write a scene when I’m not sure how to tie it together with the overall plot, because those ideas can come later (or the scene can be killed in the final draft of the novel). A short story would have to be cohesive from the get-go and be a polished, finished, final version by the time I post it here.