I started thinking about the world where this series takes place when I was 14 years old. I was riding the train home one day and I just took out a marble notebook and started writing. It was basically my own personal escape route from a world I found boring and futile. Sometimes I would go there and have adventures, sometimes I just thought about how the world was put together. Somehow, figuring out how an imaginary magically-based sewer system might work, was more interesting to me than Algebra.

After I grew up a little and realized that it was my own sense of apathy that made the world boring, I began to evolve my imaginary world. It stopped being a purely self-indulgent fantasy. Every new idea I came across expanded the world and made it more real. A story started taking shape in my mind. The story was epic in scale, encompassing everything from the gods on their thrones, to subatomic structures. At the same time the story was deeply personal. Since this world started out as the wish fulfillment fantasy my own personality and attitude was scattered like buckshot throughout the world. 

That's probably true of most writers to one extent or another, but I want the further step of having a character that shares my name and likeness. Is he me? No. I'm not that crazy...yet. He needs a very different life from my own. I just needed someone to play the part of my voice in the story and, being both an arrogant little bastard and a bit of postmodernist, I wasn't satisfied with the Shakespearian method of doing that. Although fictional me is kind of a fool. 

The main action of the epic story takes place four years into the character's life as a wizard when he's about as grown-up as he's going to get. 

As I was writing my story and was thinking about the background of all my characters I realized that there were all these stories from before the main arc of the greater story. All my characters come to the table with a complicated history and I wanted a way to tell those histories. That's what this series is about. It's about telling those stories. It'll follow fictional Vlad most of the time, as he learns the world and the people in it so will you. It's the story of how the boy became the man and about how the people in his life learn how to put up with me. I mean him. You know what I mean. Right?