I Didn’t Set Out to Write a Trilogy

How One Book Became Three and Why the Characters Wouldn’t Let Me Stop

29 March 2026 ~ 3 min read

When I finished An Apology to the Cosmos, the first book in what is now the Cosmic Janitor Trilogy, I thought I was done. I had written a complete story—beginning, middle, end. Seán had his arc. The cosmos had been suitably janited. I closed the document and felt the satisfaction of a finished thing.

The characters disagreed.

They were angry with me, if I’m being honest. Not in any mystical sense—I don’t believe my laptop is haunted—but in the way that characters who haven’t finished talking make a writer feel hollow. Seán and Niamh’s love story had barely begun. The Devil’s comedic descent had so much further to fall. And the more I dug into Irish folklore and mythology, the more I realized how much I’d only scratched the surface. There was an entire world of Celtic gods, supernatural creatures, and ancient traditions that the first book had gestured toward but never fully explored.

But the one story that wouldn’t let go of me was the Dance of the Dead—a legend from the western islands of Ireland. It begins with a warning: “It is especially dangerous to be out late on the last night of November… the last night when the dead have leave to dance on the hills with the fairies, and after that they must all go back to their graves.” That image—the dead dancing with fairies on a single November night before returning to the earth—cracked open the entire second book. What if the story took place across that threshold? What if the Morrígan herself walked into the novel on the night when the boundary between worlds is thinnest?

It didn’t hurt that I had just come back from a week in Cork. The city got into my blood the way cities sometimes do—the accent, the attitude, the pubs, the stubborn insistence that Cork is the real capital of Ireland. I came home knowing that Seán’s world needed to be rooted there, in a specific place with specific people who would react to cosmic apocalypse by finishing their pints and carrying on with quiz night.

So, The Morrígan’s Game became Book 2—deeper into Irish mythology, deeper into the love story, deeper into the Devil’s increasingly humiliating defeats. I wrote the Morrígan as a goddess who walks into a Cork pub and expects to be understood on her own terms. I wrote Samhain and Threshold Eve as the nights when everything becomes possible and everything becomes costly. I wrote the Dance of the Dead into the fabric of the story because the legend demanded it.

And then Book 2 ended in a stalemate. Not a cliffhanger—a genuine unresolved tension between forces that couldn’t be settled in two books. The cosmos still needed answering. Seán still had further to go. The Morrígan had left instructions. So now I was writing Book 3, not because I’d planned a trilogy but because the story insisted on completing its pattern.

That’s the thing about trilogies that aren’t planned—they find their shape the way a Celtic knot finds its shape. You start with one line, follow it where it leads, and eventually realize it was always going to loop back and cross itself. Three books, three movements, three interlocking spirals. I didn’t design it. I just followed the knot.

~ Liam