Sophia Had a Future Before I Knew Where She Was Going
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When I wrote Vegas Viking, I knew Sophia was a little girl.
I also knew she wouldn’t stay one.
At some point, she would be twenty-five, leave, and begin a story of her own. What I did not know was where she was going.
Apparently, that part was going to be my problem later.
I hadn’t created Dragon World yet. There was no fully developed dragon-filled destination waiting for her. But there was Sophia, and I knew her future would reach beyond the book I was writing.
She was part god, after all. An entirely ordinary life didn’t seem especially likely.
I also had possibilities in mind for abilities she would develop, including astral projection. Exactly when and how those would unfold was another question, and some of those threads are still waiting.
This is one of the interesting things about writing a connected universe. Sometimes you know something about a character long before you understand what you’re going to do with it.
Not everything arrives in order.
Which is mildly inconvenient for someone who would occasionally appreciate a sensible set of instructions.
I knew Vegas Viking would be complicated and supernatural when I started thinking about it. I just needed a world for all that complication to live in.
I didn’t have every detail worked out. What I had was a sense of how things should work, some characters who refused to be ordinary, and threads I wanted to follow.
Sophia was one of those threads.
Her future was there before it had a setting.
There was also quite a bit of time for these ideas to grow. I wrote the first 10,000 words of Vegas Viking, then paused for about three years before writing the rest.
The manuscript may have been waiting, but my imagination apparently wasn’t.
The lore kept building. Connections developed. Characters acquired histories, possibilities, and things they weren’t necessarily explaining to anybody.
Including me.
By the time I returned to the book, I had been carrying that world around in my head for years.
Now, looking back, I sometimes catch myself wondering how I came up with all of it. Then I remember that I didn’t come up with it in one afternoon. Some of those ideas had a very long time to make themselves comfortable.
But I don’t want to pretend I had every future book neatly mapped out.
I didn’t.
Knowing Sophia would have her own series was not the same as knowing what that series would be. I had left a door open for her. Later, I discovered what was on the other side.
The more concrete turning point came while I was finishing my third book, Vegas Wolf. My husband had made a 3D dragon egg, and suddenly that egg gave my imagination somewhere new to go.
Sophia was five in that story. That is how the egg became part of her life at five: I added material to Vegas Wolf before finishing the book, and the possibilities kept growing from there.
Later, I reworked material from the ending of Vegas Viking, including Sophia’s departure in the epilogue, into the beginning of Rise of the Red Dragon. The future I had left open for her finally had somewhere to lead.
That became Dragon World.
Not every thread needed to be pulled into the first book. Some possibilities remain open. They may become a scene someday, take another direction, or simply surface when characters have a conversation over coffee.
The little girl from Brothers of Odin had a future, and eventually that future grew into a story big enough to carry her.
One of the pleasures of writing these books is getting to see a character at different points in her life. Readers can meet Sophia as a child, then follow her into an adult adventure with challenges and choices of her own.
There’s something lovely about that.
She isn’t frozen at the age she was when she first appeared. She gets to grow beyond the role of somebody’s daughter and become the person at the center of her own story.
And I get to discover what happens when she does.
So no, I hadn’t planned Dragon World when I began Vegas Viking. I knew Sophia would go to another world, but I hadn’t decided what that world would be. Dragon World came much later.
What I already had was Sophia—and the promise that she was going somewhere.
It took me a while to catch up.
If you’d like to meet the world she came from, Vegas Viking is being serialized on Substack. If you’re ready to follow her into her own adventure, her story continues in Rise of the Red Dragon.
One universe. Three epic perspectives. And characters who do not always wait for their author to have everything figured out.