The first three novels I ever published back in the early 1990’s were Born of Night, Born of Fire and Born of Ice (Paradise City).   Unfortunately, I sold them to three different publishers. As a result of contract stipulations, I had to break them apart and make them three stand-alone books and remove entire sections of them. I had to change character names, all “League” terms, and replot the timeline of those original 1990 books, and make it appear as if they were never a series or related in any way.

Once the Dark-Hunter books came out to such immediate success, fans began begging for The League books to be published again, especially since those earlier copies were going for as much as a thousand dollars on eBay. Fortunately, I was able to get the rights of the books back from their original publishers and then offer them to my DH publisher. When St. Martin’s bought the three books and republished them, I was able to go in and rewrite all three novels and put them back together as a cohesive series.   Not to mention, I’d written them in my early twenties (Born of Night was written when I was just twenty years old and sold when I was only twenty-three), and I would like to think that I’ve improved my skills over the years. At least that’s the myth I tell myself at night :)

There was substantial rewriting on Born of Night and Born of Fire, but Born of Ice was tossed out and completely rewritten from scratch so that it would fit with the first two novels. It is an entirely different book from it’s original Paradise City.

When I originally started the series way back when, I envisioned writing the first set The League: Nemesis Rising (Nykyrian, Sin, Hauk, Darling, Caillen, Nero, etc.) where the Sentella battled against the League, and then picking up thirty five years later with The League: Nemesis Legacy with their children’s lives after the war had long ended and they’d settled into the “new order.” When I couldn’t get those publishers to continue publishing Nemesis Rising (those two publishers had this weird idea back then that SF had stopped selling and didn’t want to buy it from anyone, any longer), I moved on to Adron and Devyn’s books- both of which sold, but then the publishers were sold and their lines were canceled. Adron’s was originally a full novel, but was cut down to be in a novella that now appears in In Other Worlds. The publishing industry is an interesting animal.

So there we have the mystery as to why I jumped forward in time from Nemesis Rising to Nemesis Legacy. I do try to stick close to time lines, but unfortunately it’s not always possible. Publishing loves to keep all of us on our toes :) And to answer the other question, no you don’t have to read the books in order to understand them. I write each book as a stand alone so that if someone picks up a book, they won’t be lost.