When I started writing the Dronefall Series, I was in college.
Which honestly doesn’t feel that long ago to me. Mentally I’m still there, in that one corner of the library. I had a place staked out upstairs by the windows—probably the most introverted location in the student center. Not sure if anybody noticed that was where I lived, but it definitely was. What’s weird is, if I went back there today looking for that desk, I wouldn’t find it. Not just the desk, either. The corner is gone. My alma mater has changed more than I have since 2017.
I didn’t really like college very much, but I kinda miss the era. I don’t think I felt it at the time, but being 21 or whatever has a certain magic. It’s okay, and even expected to still be a potential something at that time. It’s only a matter of time before they give up on you once you graduate.
But there was probably a lot to distract me from the exhilaration of my own potential at the time. Like I mentioned, I was having a mildly lousy time in school. The fact I could fairly easily write whole novels while somehow staying roughly caught-up on my classwork never impressed me. I wrote several books during college that will never see the light of day.
Dronefall was different.
From the beginning, Dronefall felt markedly like a breakout series. The story had reach. It had potential I could not only feel but also believe in on rational grounds. This was the kind of story that gets written because it needs to get out and run. And, mostly subconsciously, I wrote it for people who were going to find themselves where I was when I conceived it—a bit confused, slightly displaced, and wondering if they were really where God wanted them to be.
Simply put: the college students.
The Dronefall Series isn’t another YA dystopian where teenagers fall in love while leading a revolution and saving the world. I think it’s meant to land with an older audience that wants to see more development. The cast is older, more complicated, and stubbornly refusing to pair up. (Despite everybody being suspiciously attractive.)
The main character is locked in on increasingly sharp-focused personal goals, and she doesn’t have the time to worry about this guy or that guy or what happily-ever-after looks like. She’s also facing a problem too deep-rooted to be solved by brave slogans, raised fists, and revolution. This is something college students—especially Christian college students—are likely to discover for the first time at this life stage.
The Dronefall Series begins, like a lot of stories, with the main character, Halcyon Slavik, leaving her old life behind and diving into a new world—even if that new world is still in her home city of Budapest. (Same, Hal. My college was also in my hometown.) Rather than ever truly adjusting to her new reality, Halcyon finds her double life in the semi-secret Christian community and the drone-sniping underworld pushes her to face increasingly deep questions about who she is—and if who she is even matters in the end.
Along the way, she learns to love people she never meant to meet, pries into the complexity and darkness oppressing her world, and finds God is in the midst of it all despite everything. By the end, she will find herself on the brink of a new world—the razor’s edge of hope and fear—only having scratched the surface of what she’s called to do. Most of us have been there before. All of us will be there again someday. None of us go there alone.
Dronefall was born on a college campus. Maybe that’s why I’m so convinced it has a future there. The whole series is finally out, everybody. In case you didn’t get the memo. It’s finally a complete story, ready to launch out into the big open world and improve some people’s lives, hopefully. I’ve got my old school in the crosshairs right now. I need to get to the Christian student subculture there somehow. I have something for them.
Are you ready to start the series? (Or pick it up where you left off?) Here are the links to ALL SIX books, at last.
Thanks for joining me in my imaginary world. Don’t forget to review and recommend these books to anyone you think might appreciate them.