During the second half of 2023, I started working on a story that had been sparked by a fever dream featuring Rihanna’s song “Diamonds.” The story was my attempt to answer two questions: what could “break” Amanda King? And what would it take to bring Lee Stetson in from the field for good?
At the time, I knew the answers but not the details, so I began writing “The Energy of Sun Rays” with those in mind, thinking that it might top out around 20,000 words and six or seven chapters. As those who’ve read Standing in the Dark — which is what “The Energy of Sun Rays” became — may know, that’s not the way things worked out. It’s not even close.
Now, here I am, two-and-a-half years and nearly 150,000 words later, having finally reached the end of that original story. A lot has happened, both personally and professionally, in those two-and-a-half years. But perhaps the most significant — and the most amazing — was the realization that Lee’s and Amanda’s story would not be over after All That Mattered.
Once again, it’s not even close.
I knew from the outset that “The Energy of Sun Rays” might have a sequel, but at the time it was vaguely defined. During early development for All That Mattered, I brainstormed some ideas for that sequel, thinking I might want to be aware of it as I wrote the book ahead of it. I started out thinking about one sequel, but by the end of the first week — during which I’d also been working on the last parts of Standing in the Dark — I’d sketched out an idea for seven sequels to All That Mattered.
That would be a total of nine books. Nine!
The first time I had the thought, it scared me all the way down to my toes.
This is fan fiction. While I’ve always been serious about craft when it comes to my fan fiction work, I’d never considered it to be anything more than a pastime or — more commonly — good practice for writing original fiction. It was also sometimes an escape when I needed it. But now I was contemplating a sprawling, multi-year fan fiction project that would take me a significant amount of time to finish. I’m not a fast writer, after all, and I also work a full-time job and have a normal life.
But the idea just would not go away.
I’d effectively committed to writing All That Mattered, at least. But I spent a lot of time reflecting while writing this book, asking myself just what I thought I was doing and why I was doing it. Many of the answers had to do with my own personal psychology, so I won’t go into them here. But there was one reason that wasn’t so personal, one that seemed like it got to the heart of just what fan fiction is:
I wanted to finish the story.
In Scarecrow and Mrs. King, we actually saw character development for both Lee and Amanda. Thanks to the nature of episodic television, the opportunities for that were limited. But it did happen, as we spent four years watching them transition from reluctant partners, to friends, to falling in love, to marrying and starting to build a life in common. And it was done without the usual “tricks” that so often happen in today’s shows: no will-we-or-won’t-we (just a lot of near misses). No angst, no emotional whiplash, no playing with the viewers’ heads. What we saw on that screen was a story that was a gradual development that passed through common and familiar phases.
In the middle of all the humor and wacky cases, Scarecrow and Mrs. King showed us something real.
It told us truths about who we were. It showed us that even when life was utterly ridiculous and the implausible became the routine, people were still people. They went through stages of life, they built their next steps, and they handed things on. It showed us a simple, honest, and entirely possible hope about our own futures.
With television being television, it never could have lasted forever. But that theme, the story of life as lived through two people who set out to make the world a better place, is timeless. It repeats hundreds of millions of times every single day: every time a spouse chooses their marriage over their selfish desires. Every time a parent learns to let an older child go. Every time, to paraphrase a quote from Babylon 5, someone says “no” to letting antipathy or other negative forces win.
That story, the story of how Lee and Amanda finished that progression, is the story I’m trying to finish.
But still, it gave me pause. Nine books?
Even more significantly: those nine books would only cover six years of their lives!
Somehow, after that, the nine books morphed themselves into what’s currently looking like fifteen.
That scared me badly enough to nearly quit, right there, on the spot.
And I tried.
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t give up wondering how Lee’s and Amanda’s stories would eventually end.
There’s a natural endpoint, of course — their deaths. But I’d already decided that, after all the craziness and hoopla of their lives, I wanted that part to be simple and quiet. No heroics. No stirring legacies. Just the tale of two lives, lived fully and lived honestly. A true story. A story that a family might pass down over time, one that answers the question of “why” in a way only such stories can.
At the end of Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Lee and Amanda were in their mid-to-late thirties. There is an awful lot of life left to live after that point, much more than can be summed up in a neat, “they lived happily ever after.”
Life — real life — isn’t that neat.
But that’s also what makes it real. What makes it worth living. And what makes it worth celebrating.
As of this writing, the Restless Hearts series has seven additional books to be written. After that, there will be a follow-up series that I’ve tentatively named Bergamot and Vetiver. There will also be a final volume that lays everything to rest. I’ll be honest: I don’t know if I’ll actually finish the series. I have my own real life to live, after all, and I’m also in the process of branching out into original fiction.
That said, I see no reason to stop writing this series now — and every reason to keep going.
The next book, A New Horizon, is set during the latter half of 1988. It explores several of the issues I’ve opened up in All That Mattered, including Lee’s search for his Hamilton relatives, the way the Stetson-King family changes as a result of being relocated, and, perhaps most significantly for Lee and Amanda, whether a transition away from active field duty means a transition away from the work that is so important to them both.
I can’t wait to see what they figure out and how they choose to handle it.
For those of us in Generation X, the late 1980s and early 1990s were a significant time in history. We had grown up in the shadow of World War II — which our grandparents remembered, and told us about, in vivid detail — and, just as we started coming of age, that shadow lifted and dissolved. It dramatically affected the very order we’d been taught was “normal,” thrusting us into a world that was both easier and harder to navigate.
As such, it’s impossible for me to tell Lee’s and Amanda’s stories without placing them into the greater context. With the caveat that all errors are my own, I’ve added Author’s Notes to several of the chapters in All That Mattered.
I am by no means a computer or tactical systems expert. What I am is a good researcher, who knows how to ask good questions. There is a difference between the two, however, which is why I want to reinforce that neither of those sets of details should be considered authoritative or completely correct. In fact, there’s a decent chance they aren’t, because in the end, the author’s job is to tell the story rather than report facts. That’s why artistic license exists in the first place.
That said, I do know how to run a web site. When I realized that this fan fiction “universe” was becoming complex, I began writing down supplemental material for my own reference. You can read some of it right here at the Legends Lost web site. Stay tuned for more updates!