These introspections – an inward look at the reasons for spending years developing a fiction project that breaks all the norms – explains why I wrote the project, my motivations and what it is all about.
I’m usually quite a private person, but since this project has taken so much time and effort to get here, I decided it’s time to open the doors a little on why I dedicated myself to it in the first place. … and why it took ten years in the making.
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Premise Construction
The Elements is an exploration of time, belief and fate. This is based on archaeological discovery and esoteric doctrine is the common thread linking different people at different times together. Linked by chance, circumstance, ideas and actions, the central underlying premise is that ‘reality’ can only be understood as ‘actions-in-time’. When those actions influence each other over perhaps, a time-gap of decades, but were the threads never-the-less continue to be woven, the result is a multi-threaded plot extending both, and back in time. Reality becomes the experience of becoming entangled in those threads, our actions determined by those who have gone before us, where we ourselves only partly determine our present, as we ourselves through our own actions, define the conditions for the future.
Theme
Each book has a distinct thematic identity working with the classical elements air-earth-fire-water, expanded to the elements stone, mist and ice reaching the esoteric number 7 forming the basis for 7 deceptions and 7 revelations revealed throughout the working of the series.
Each theme therefore, is interpreted figuratively and literally, each element book becoming an exploration of an emerging whole where perception and understanding comes together. The use of the elements as a thematic concept becomes more literal as the series unfolds, the real meaning of the elements becoming apparent at the end and how they are combined, answering the questions raised in the prologue.
Structure
Each book takes the reader on a voyage of the imagination going deeper into the secrets of the past as the West and East move closer towards conflict. Heroes, anti-heroes, legends of the past, the fading resistance generation, power brokers, puppet masters, spies, controllers and gatekeepers are just some of the people and events covered in the series.
Based on real places, real events, real people, history married to fiction in a contemporary post-modern idiom, The Elements is a new concept for entertaining literary fiction: It works with a compelling and intricately detailed plot, drawing extensively on the wars and wartime and archaeological secrets of twentieth century.
As the threads come together, the complete story is woven into a search for the truth – revealed to be far more meaningful than the those conditioned by the schemes of the intelligence community. Some of the subjects covered to this end include mythological aspects (draugr killings in the Prologue, the saga of Rómund, Æsahult church, numerous Egyptian references in The Labyrinth trilogy that will develop throughout the series), unknown aspects of the transition from WWII to the cold war (illegal liquidations of the Nightingales resistance group; the attack on the Shell House, secret underground operations), past key discoveries covered up because of conflicting interests.
The resulting Elements concept unites the books by a thematic code. This is used to order the story elements as an interpretation of the elements: Darkness, Earth, Stone, Water, Air, Ice and Fire.