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I stayed up for several nights working on the cover design. Once a designer, always a designer, I guess. I’m disproportionately pleased with the way it came out.
I lost days of sleep over the last few months working on the manuscript with my editor, Andy. He kept finding places where I hadn’t invested ahead of time in the payoff. The backstory was clear in my head, but hadn’t made it onto the page.
Many times writing this novel, I felt chills. A few times I teared up. But going back to write a few of these earlier scenes after the fact, I broke down sobbing. That’s when I knew the characters had become real for me.
I started writing this book—actually writing words—in 2020 when I found myself unemployed during COVID. The two job offers I’d been verbally given the same week, March of 2020, evaporated as the world suddenly realized how screwy things were going to become.
I started working on this book way back around the turn of the century. I’d awoken from a dream. I’d been hiking in the woods and come across a village from the turn of the previous century, abandoned but perfectly preserved.
As I wandered the village, looking into abandoned and dusty storefronts filled with unsold goods, I wondered what had happened. A man hailed me from the distance. He was elderly. He was the caretaker of the village and welcomed me. He said he’d inherited it from his father, who’d inherited it from his father before him. That it was a boom town during a gold rush, but that when the gold played out, the people left.
I woke up confused. And intrigued. It was one of those dreams that really stuck with me, fishing hooks firmly embedded in my brain. I started thinking about how a perfectly preserved village like that could be turned into a theme park of some kind. I called my friend, Gary, who was working at Disney, and we talked about the idea for several hours. I was enthusiastic and excited but felt weird, like Gary must have thought I was nuts. He played along, at the very least.
I kept thinking about this idea over the years. I’d written most of a novella in graduate school—80 pages or so falling out of me like water from a hose. But I felt like it was too derivative and abandoned it for 30 years. That novella became Frost, which I published last year after dusting it off and rewriting it.
I knew I was capable of writing a novel. I’d written several short stories, plus the unfinished Frost. But if I was going to take time off from a busy career and family to write a novel, I was going to really put in the work. I just never felt like I had the time or extra energy I knew it would take to turn this idea into a novel.
Years went by.
In 2016 I was driving across the country with my wife. We were on the highway in Montana, and a small sign caught my attention. It read “Garnet Ghost Town” with an arrow pointing to a dirt road off the four-lane undivided highway.
I pointed it out to Erynn, and she said, “Let’s do it.” I almost flipped the Honda Pilot, turning onto the dirt road at highway speed. We drove into the woods for way too long. Every time we got to the point of giving up, we’d come to a crossroad that had another sign. After almost an hour, thinking we were driving into a trap set by meth-heads, we came upon Garnet. It’s amazing. The best-preserved ghost town in the U.S., according to their sign.
We spent a few hours wandering Garnet. It’s truly incredible. And right then, the novel went beyond fishing hooks and was metaphorically more like a bone graft.
Years went by.
I was introduced to Hugh Howey by a mutual friend. I’d read his book Wool and was a huge fan. Hugh hosted a meetup in Seattle, where I lived at the time, for writers. I went, even though I hadn’t written anything besides a few hundred trade articles and some essays in previous decades. Hugh was very gracious, despite my fanboy intrusion amongst the working writers.
We connected—at least I connected—over a shared background working in our 20s as boat captains. He’s a bit younger than me, but our timeframes overlapped, and we knew a few people in common.
When he asked what I was working on, I gave him my job description. He laughed. He said, “No, what are you writing?” I was a bit embarrassed. I explained that while I was writing hundreds of pages of content a month, most of it was strategy or vision papers and product specifications. And the rest was trade articles. I was writing two monthly columns at the time.
He looked a bit uncomfortable, and I said, “Well, I have a mostly finished novella that I started in grad school. And I’ve got this crazy story that’s had its hooks in me for years, and eventually I’ll write it.”
He looked both relieved and interested. “What’s it about?”
So I told him about it. He said something polite and, of course, encouraged me to write it. He was in high demand, and I’d taken up more time than I should have, and he was whisked off by another writer.
So a few years later, when I suddenly had some time, I realized there were no excuses. It was time to write the novel I’d been putting off for 20 years.
I quickly learned that my history degree was both a blessing and a curse when writing a historical novel. Frost fell out of me with very little effort—it was like breathing. Writing the historical sections of Legacy was a slog. I probably spent five to ten hours researching for every hour I wrote. It wasn’t unpleasant—I love researching history. It was, however, a lot of effort. Months were going by, and I was uncovering more historical mysteries and opportunities for every one that I incorporated into the story.
It felt like serendipity—and panic. I saw that the four months that I’d allocated to getting this book done were not going to be nearly enough. It makes me laugh to read that sentence right now, because I had so hilariously misunderstood how long this was going to take. The modern storyline was easy; I wrote each of those chapters in a day or two, but the historical sections were becoming interminable. I was a bit panicky because I needed to find a job. But COVID giveth and COVID taketh away, and I soldiered on.
Ultimately I was nowhere near done, stuck on the chapter where the executives from Yomohiro Corporation visited Idaho, when I did ultimately get a job. And things slowed way down. Each time I picked up the book, I had to reread what I’d already written to get back into the pace, and it was a self-reinforcing loop; as I wrote more, it took longer to pick the threads back up each time.
Finally, after more than two years, I had another break from work. I took that three months and made huge progress, but then got another job. Another two years, and I left that role and began consulting full time. This has turned out to be perfect, as I’m working about 50% of my time, and the rest has been used for writing and then editing.
This novel is a bit of a beast. It is a multi-generational saga that is nonlinear, meaning the modern story is interleaved with the historical story. I have a lot of literary friends, and a lot who are avid readers, so I got really valuable feedback from both groups. Some feedback that I got was that there were too many characters to keep straight. This was mostly because each of the stories had a full cast of characters, and the historical story stretched from 1867 to 1910 and involved founding and growing an entire village.
About eight months ago, I decided to disentangle the two stories and publish them as two linear books. So I dove into the historical story and treated it like an exercise in fleshing out a novel. There was a lot that it needed to stand on its own, and it was all valuable content that furthered the story.
I pulled in several new readers who had never touched the original interleaved story, and the feedback was universal that it was well written and a good story—but that it seemed like it was missing something important. And it was.
I’d never written the historical sections as a standalone—they were designed such that there was a slow build in the historical sections toward things that were revealed in the modern sections. Together, they were whole, but separately, they were incomplete.
I finally realized that there weren’t too many characters—at least not in service of the story I was writing. They just needed more room to breathe and to be complete beings. So in the exercise of writing each book to be standalone, I fleshed those characters out to the point where they were three-dimensional. And after a good friend—who had been an original reader, and then a reader on the standalone historical novel—told me he thought it needed to be welded back together…
By this point, the combined stories landed around 130,000 words. Which already is a lot. After a lot of thinking and discussions with other readers, I realized he was correct. And I welded the two stories back together.
I finally was at the point where I felt like the book was “done,” or at least whole. I reached out to a very close friend who is also a professional editor, Andrea Lorenzo Molinari. He had the time available to help, and he came on board as my official editor.
Andy is awesome. He was coming to this story—that I felt was complete—with fresh eyes. He started asking me some hard questions about various characters and scenes, and as we completed the first rounds of edits, I had a whole list of new scenes that needed to be added. Thanks be to Andy, because he was so right! The book really needed those additional scenes to be complete.
So that’s the whole story about the story—the saga of the creation of Crystal Village and the characters that inhabit the place. I hope you enjoy the book.
Today is July 4th, 2025 and the book went live on the 3rd as an eBook. The print release is waiting on me getting proofs back. If you want to read on paper, please keep checking back – and sign up for the newsletter, so you can get updates on availability. You’ll also get some free exclusive content for subscribers, and opportunities to weigh in on future books.
Eric Picard 