I want to tell you where the Black Water series is going.

Not everything. Some of it has to stay in the manuscript until you read it. But enough so you understand that what I built in the first book was a foundation and what comes next is the structure that goes on top of it.

Alan Charms spent the first book divided. One foot in the modern world with its conflicts and relationships and unresolved questions. One foot in the spiritual realm with its ancient landscape and its entities and its rules that operate nothing like the visible world. The first book established both worlds and let Alan begin to understand what it means to move between them.

The sequel goes deeper.

Alan will spend significantly more time in the spiritual world. That world will become more fully realized — its geography, its inhabitants, its history, its political and spiritual architecture. It will stop being a place he visits and start being a place he lives in for extended periods. The ancient, medieval quality of that realm will become more pronounced. The people he encounters there will become more complex. The stakes in that world will become real in a way that makes the modern world conflicts feel like the secondary story for a significant portion of the book.

And Camille.

Alan discovers in the sequel that Camille is his wife in that realm. Not a stranger. Not an entity. His. That revelation changes the entire dynamic of what their relationship means and what it demands from him. It changes what the spiritual world is to him — from a place he enters to a life he has to learn to inhabit. That discovery and its consequences will drive a significant portion of the sequel’s emotional core.

The two worlds will not stay separate forever. They never could. The modern world conflicts will resurface later in the book and Alan will have to navigate both simultaneously — carrying what he is becoming in the spiritual world into the physical world that is still waiting for him to resolve what he left unfinished.

I am more excited about this series than I have been about anything I have written. Not because the first book was perfect — it was not and I have been honest about that in this series of posts. But because I know what the world can hold. I built the architecture first. I tested the rules. I know where the story is going and I know that the destination is worth the journey.

I started writing because a girl handed me a book and I needed something to talk about.

I kept writing because the thing Peretti put in me that summer on my father’s couch never left. That hunger for the invisible world made visible. For the spiritual made physical. For the story that operates on two levels simultaneously and rewards the reader who pays attention on both.

Black Water is that story. The series is just getting started.

If you have not read the first book yet there is a link below. Come find out what Alan Charms walked into. And come back for what happens next.

Stephon Rudd