-One key plot point for Slaying a Tyrant – the villain’s magical enslavement of the mercenaries who work for him – didn’t occur to me until 2016, several months after finishing the rough draft. It came to me during a trip to Disney World with family members. Make of that what you will.

-“Rijal” is a man’s name, and the Jaiyan name for the Pole Star, but it was loosely based on my name for my childhood parakeet.

-Four to six characters in Loving a Deathseer are loosely based on characters from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. One of them is gender-flipped: Sir Thomas Bertram is the inspiration for the female politician whom the bad guys are targeting. Two more are composite characters: the politician’s husband is a composite of Lady Bertram and Mr. Bennet (from Pride & Prejudice), and their spoiler daughter is a composite of Maria Bertram and Julia Bertram. The others are pretty obvious if you’ve read both books.

–Scapegoating a Hero is very vaguely inspired by the Nanavati murder case, but has dramatic differences from the real life story and the various films based on it. For one thing, the heroine does not commit adultery in Hero, and for another, the fallout from the case within the judicial system is less drastic in Hero. The public figure known as the “Father of Jaiya” in this book is not intended to resemble any real world figure.

–Hero is probably my own favorite of the Jaiya Metaseries, just because I was trying something very different from anything I’d done before. It was an interesting challenge, and since it involves a murder trial and some legal maneuvering, I was very pleased when the lawyer in my family liked it.

-During NaNoWriMo2017, I tried to write what would become Saving a Queen. At that time, the story was loosely inspired (with different geography and the usual fantasy elements) by the British siege of Jhansi in 1858, but I quickly realized that this was a story too grim for me to tell. Over the course of 2018, I came up with a different story, about a young queen escaping after her city fell to siege, and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.

-Airships had been a minor element in the NaNoWriMo version of Queen, but the hero’s personal lighter-than-air craft became a major player in the final version of Saving a Queen, practically a co-star. (“I liked the one with the balloon,” a family member told me, once I’d published all of the Jaiya Metaseries.)

-Chronological order for the Jaiya Metaseries: Slaying a Tyrant, Saving a Queen, Scapegoating a Hero, Seeking the Quantum Tree, Marrying a Monster, Waking the Dreamlost, Loving a Deathseer.

-Publication order for the Jaiya Metaseries: Marrying a Monster, Waking the Dreamlost, Loving a Deathseer, Slaying a Tyrant, Saving a Queen, Scapegoating a Hero, Seeking the Quantum Tree.

-The order in which the Jaiya Metaseries was written: Loving a Deathseer (November 2010), Marrying a Monster (November 2013), Slaying a Tyrant (November 2015), Waking the Dreamlost (Summer 2016), Seeking the Quantum Tree (November 2016), Scapegoating a Hero (February 2017 to mid-2018), and Saving a Queen (November 2017 to October 2018).