Books are always a weird thing. They're a graft of many things on a tree, and they flourish weirdly. Or at least, they should, unless you're writing on market for Harlequin or something.

The Changed Ones - whose initial title was The Chosen Ones, but that worked out a bit worse than the new one - began as a basic story outline written in early 2019. "The Day of the Last Dead" (and yes, you'll find that in the timeline) took place in the distant future after the RPG Apocalypse, 30 years after the last person born before said Apocalypse died of old age. It was actually a very generic litRPG - boy gets finally his system fully unlocked, struggles with supposedly useless skills while getting bullied and mocked, survives miraculously an encounter with a too-powerful beast, gets OP skill from it, and gets roped in to fight against a great evil, etcetera. I'm sure you've read the story already. But the interesting part was the "long after the apocalypse" bit. I'm not the first to explore that type of setting, but it is an interesting and underused one.

The seed in this fertile soil came from one Reddit discussion about why write litrpg. If the RPG part didn't change anything, you should write normal fantasy instead, people argued, and that provided an idea. After all, books like Dragonlance have AD&D underneath, and you can see some of the bits poking out (casting limits per day are a thing, I think, etc), but it is not a litRPG. If it has a litRPG System, but the people operating under it can't see it, then from their perspective, it is a fantasy world. So... what if you couldn't see the RPG, but someone else could? You've got two perspectives on the same world, and a contrast emerges. The reader suddenly knows things the characters can't know, and it comes about "naturally" rather than as a forced exposition by the author.

Then, I started grafting stuff on the core idea, developing the world. You find a few tropes to twist - like the expectation that the guy who dies in the first chapter and who's listed as a core character will be reincarnated as the OP main character - and more importantly, you need to try to figure where it will lead and how it should end. The first chapters of the draft of "Chosen Ones" got started during the third book of The Infinite Labyrinth, and after finishing the first self-contained story in that universe, I finally decided this one was the most enticing. It was a toss-up between that and an urban progression fantasy (Runecasters, which has a problem in which I didn't know how to finish book 1. I still don't). But the Changed world won, and my cultivation Qi Apocalypse came third.

The Changed Ones is a trilogy. When I decided it was going to be one I wrote next, it had a beginning, a set of themes, and an ending point. Yes, the final book 3 epilogue is already written (although I may extend it because there are so many things that get wrapped up...). Right now, the first book is over, the cast has properly left their old lives behind, and great things are down the road. So, buckle up, because Johanna, Tom, Peter, and Laura - and Moore, of course - are going to leave a wake of... extreme Change as they cross northern America, on a mission for their Ancient patron.