When you read your own books aloud to your kids

So last month I finished the 10th book of my After Atlantis series. It was a ton of work, and it was such a relief to publish it and be done.

Then my older kids said, “You know, Mom, you need to read this aloud to the little kids. They haven’t heard the whole series before.”

It dawned on me that I started publishing this series in 2020, when my 9 year old was 4. My middle kids definitely wouldn’t remember these books, especially the early ones. I asked them if they wanted me to read them the books, and they agreed. So I began the journey from Guardian’s Awakening, when Tane goes from being the beta muscle of a superhero team to being the Guardian of the Mercurion, allllllll the way through the Vid:ilantes series with James courting HeroTube hits and stumbling across the Lost Atlantean Isles, to the big crossover book, all the way down to Tyrona, when the exiled Emperor of Atlantis makes his big play.

I’ve read my other books multiple times over the years, because I love the moments in them (the big crossover book, Mercurion, is definitely a favorite). But this is the first time I’d read Tyrona since I published it. I was kind of scared. All I could remember was how hard I worked on it, all the feedback, the parts I ripped out and rewrote. I didn’t know if the *story* held up.

Anyway, today we finished reading Tyrona aloud. Oh man. Oh man oh man was it good. It starts off with a bang and is just action, action, action all the way through. It pays off every major plot point from the other books: James’s ill-fated viral video, the Quetzelcoatl Jayesh tamed, the rising unrest on HeroTube, the Lighthouse finally deploying from its pocket dimension, the source of the Emperor’s power, the Aspected and the Ascendants, it’s all in there. Each new payoff made me so happy. It’s like … the way the final book of a series should be, you know? Every character from the main cast gets a moment in the spotlight. Everybody gets to be badass. Everybody pays a price of some kind to build to the Emperor’s ultimate defeat. The way the Emperor is defeated is so incredibly Michael Bay that I read it going *did I really write this? This is the most epic thing I’ve ever read*.

I sighed in satisfaction as I closed that last book and put it on the shelf. Ten books, each more or less a standalone, but with a heckin’ metaplot and a heckin’ payoff. It’s actually a wrench to leave those characters behind, because in my mind, James and Jayesh and Tane and Cirrus are all still there, still having adventures. One day I’m going to have to go back.