The Discovery

I want to talk about the part nobody warns you about.

Not the writing. Not the editing, the publishing, the marketing, the events, the algorithm, the reviews. The part that happens before any of that - the part that is, if I’m being honest, the most purely joyful part of the entire process.

The research. The discovery.

The one that got away

I always said that if I ever went back to school, it would be for history.

Not because I have a specific era I want to master or a thesis I want to argue. Because I love the texture of it. The way history is never really finished being understood. The way a fact you thought was settled turns out to have seventeen layers underneath it that nobody talks about. The way the official version of anything is always, always missing something.

I didn’t go back to school. But Book 3 is giving me the excuse I’ve been waiting for.

There is a small irony in all of this that I’ve been sitting with.

Years ago, someone whose influence on my life runs deeper than I usually say out loud, talked me out of a graduate path I was considering; not unkindy, but honestly. Too much research, he said. You probably wouldn’t love it.

He wasn’t wrong about that particular kind of research. The methodical, structured, hypothesis-driven kind has never been where I live.

But this kind - the reckless, unhurried, follow-the-thread-wherever-it-goes kind…this is where I have always lived. I just didn’t have a name for it yet.

That in and of itself is it’s own kind of discovery.

The difference this time

The first two books in The Triquetra Chronicles came to me with their historical timelines already intact. Not chosen so much as received; through meditation sessions and downloads, and the specific kind of knowing that arrives before you’ve done any research at all. By the time I started investigating, I was confirming rather than discovering.

Book 3 has been different.

I wrote about this a couple weeks ago, the moment the research finally clicked into place after months of resistance. What I didn’t say then, because I was still sitting with it, is what has kept pulling me back under since.

What I love about not knowing

Here is what research feels like when you do it with reckless abandon…

You start somewhere. You find something interesting. That interesting thing points to something else. That something else opens a door you didn’t know existed. Three hours later you are somewhere you couldn’t have predicted when you began, and every step of the path makes complete sense in retrospect even though none of it was planned.

That is the specific joy I am talking about. The moment before you know anything, before you have context, before you’ve decided what matters, when the entire landscape is open and anything could be significant. The discovery.

I bring no expectations to research. No agenda. I go in the way you go into a city you’ve never visited - curious, unhurried, willing to get lost.

Getting lost is usually where the best things are.

The nuances nobody writes about

What keeps pulling me back into the rabbit hole for Book 3 is the discovery of nuances in history that I never learned, that most people never learn, because they didn’t make it into the version of the story we were taught.

The origin points. The moments before things became what we know them as. The practices and the people and the convergences of time and place that quietly shaped everything that came after, without ever being credited for it.

And something else I wasn’t expecting…the feeling that some of it is not entirely new to me. Not learned, exactly. More like remembered. The specific sensation of encountering something for the first time that somehow feels like a return.

For someone who writes about past lives, I probably shouldn’t be surprised by that.

Those are the places where my stories live. Not in the broad strokes of recorded history but in the texture underneath; the detail that makes a time and place feel real, rather than described.

I am not ready to say where Book 3 is going. But I will say that the research has already taken me somewhere better than I could have hoped for, taught me things I didn’t know I somehow already knew, and reminded me why I always said I’d go back to school for history.

This is better. No deadlines. No exams.

Just the rabbit hole, and wherever it leads.

Discovery.