My friend Alex Butcher was virtually singlehandedly responsible for so many of my stories and novels being present in book bundles. Indeed, we became friends through the process of working on all those bundles together over the course of 4 years. But, make no mistake, she was the driving force behind the bundles, not me! I’m still impressed with her willingness to do all that work to publish writers other than herself.

But Alex also played an important role in the creation of my Hades Cycle. Without Alex, I suspect I would have stopped after the first two stories of what became the series, without in fact ever creating the series at all.

The defining moment for The Hades Cycle was its fourth tale, “Eurydice in Truth.” And that defining moment occurred solely because of Alex.

Devoted as she has been to the satisfaction found in creating bundles, she’s never limited herself to bundles. Before bundles were a thing (and now after their day has passed), Alex created/creates and participates in anthologies. Naturally, she’s invited me to join in the fun at times.

The anthology pertinent to The Hades Cycle was titled Heroes in Hell. At the time Alex spoke with me, Heroes in Hell was a done deal, already complete and en route to publication. But the publisher was planning another anthology with a fresh theme, and Alex thought I might wish to write a story to contribute.

My muse being a wayward creature, she immediately delivered up inspiration for a story fitting the outgoing anthology rather than the upcoming one, and I fell headlong into “Eurydice in Truth.”

When Alex described Heroes in Hell, she’d given examples of historical heroes who might have landed in hell after their deaths, such as Alexander the Great or Cleopatra. But mythical figures tend to catch my writerly imagination more than historical ones, and—thus far—pagan myths generate story ideas for me, while Christian theology has not.

So, at Alex’s words, my mind turned to the ancient Greeks, and then to Orpheus. He was definitively a Greek hero in the mythological Greek hell. Following this trail of musing, I found myself in Eurydice’s sandals, feeling her disturbed confusion and her terror. I had to tell her story!

But “Eurydice in Truth” had one more twist in store for me as I wrote it, and I didn’t realize this until after my first reader gave me her feedback. Without intending to, I’d written the first half of “Eurydice in Truth,” but grafted it onto the second half of what would become “Take from Hell.”

That didn’t work at all!

Discussing the draft with my first reader, I was able to sort out the problem. I separated the mismatched halves, wrote the second half that belonged to “Eurydice in Truth,” and then wrote the proper first half that belonged to “Take from Hell.”

There were two further developments in the series that I’ll tell you in another post, but with “Eurydice in Truth” and “Take from Hell” on record, The Hades Cycle was firmly established as an entity and I went on to complete it. As I draft this history of the series, the rest of the stories have been in existence for many months, and I’ve been racing to catch up on the publishing front. It’s an unusual feeling for me, since I’ve never had a backlog of finished, but unpublished work before.

Here’s looking at 2023! 😀

For more about The Hades Cycle, see:
The Reputation of Dìs