I had originally planned to write two separate books. The first is with Adele telling the stories of Maxwell’s past and her many past lives. He’s getting there in time to see her die or her never finding him. I wanted to tell the stories of his many battles and all that he went through roaming the world. The second being a book about how they met, what heaven was like, and The Clash of Angels in more depth.

Some of these things made their way into the series themselves, but there is much I wanted to write. Human Ouija was originally sold as a ‘blasphemer branch book’ because of this. It is a side story connected to the world of the series, but not to the characters in it. This award-winning short story is connected to books three, Harvest, and four, Ghosts, of the series because of Briar Bishop.

The prequels are the stories that I needed to tell to add to the lore and depth of the series. It’s also my way of keeping my world on those originally announced two separate books.

Maxwell in his angelic form, who doesn’t want that? An innocent Lilith, yes, please!

The last book was the rounding out of the series. As the world begins in Maxwell Demon it shall end, almost literally, in the last book. I knew early on how the series would end but wasn’t sure how I was going to write it. It’s heavily influenced by Revelations, but with my own twist as the series has been a historical retelling of a lot of different subjects.

Adele now having accepted fully she is Lilith appears in her closest form to the original life she ever had. She reunites with long-lost loved ones to do one last battle for all of mankind.

I wanted her back. Her story in the series was never finished. She and Maxwell weren’t finished. Years ago, to a small group of fellow writers, I shared the ending of the series to get their takes on it. I got a lot of that’s interesting and ‘wow’. Would bad news from them change the ending for me? No. I was still going to write it the way I wanted.

I have never been one to bow down to the pressures of others when it comes to telling stories. Every writer I’ve ever talked to has had someone at least once try to sway them away from an idea, I am no different. It’s part of why I love being a hybrid/independent writer as much as I do. I don’t have someone telling me what to write or how to write.

This is not the same as what editors do. They are heaven-sent in my eyes and I’m in awe of how they can take my work and make it better. Editing is required. I’m talking about other writers or people that are putting their noses in business they shouldn’t. If I did listen to them, I’d never would’ve written in the first place out of fear of their opinions. Who has time for that?

Ghosts is titled that way because of the phrase ‘ghosts from the past can haunt us’. This is true in real life and especially for the character Dante. The world of The Blasphemer Series grows even more in this book, and you see how it’s been influencing Dante. You see ptsd in a vivid way, Dante is dealing with it. As someone that has been diagnosed with cptsd I could only describe it in a way that made sense to me; a represented my own experience.

It is important to understand that people suffering from this are damaged, but also healing from their own history. It was important for me to tell his story and his ptsd. I’ve read too many books about strong people not being affected by the things they’ve gone through. I cannot write about the damage people struggle with and the weight of trying to heal, the struggle that healing is. Healing is hard. You will feel like you’re getting better only to be knocked back. You must be stubborn on a level to not give up on healing. Ghosts shows this to the best that I can describe and tell.

This book is the third installment of what was originally supposed to be five books. Somewhere near the end of writing Harvest and already having started Ghosts, I knew the books weren’t going to be five. The stories were meshing together as I wrote them because it made more sense to write them like this. More was put in this book than I had thought would. Some of the scenes weren’t supposed to happen until the fourth or even the fifth book, but as I worked it made more sense to place them sooner.

So much so that the fifth book died as the stories were getting told sooner. The world of the vampires and the werewolves was meant for later books but didn’t make sense anymore for them to be.

I wanted to live up to the newfound success as a writer, especially one being a series writer. The Blasphemer Series was almost finished with Maxwell Demon. I knew I had more stories in me, I had already been working on them along with poems that had funny enough begun getting started up again in the margins of notebooks. Harvest almost didn’t happen. I stepped back from writing to focus on another part of my career in the independent industry and freelance arenas.

Dante Angeloft the first character I ever fully developed in my youth was screaming from the back of my thoughts to come out. He was the character I worried about the most. When I originally developed him, it was the turn of the millennium. The late ’90s and early ’00s were hard times. Homophobia was all throughout my school years and in the community, I grew up. Complimenting a classmate for having nice shoes would’ve been an indicator of being called a slur. It wasn’t right then and isn’t right now.

Dante, a bisexual male character, grew out of this. I felt for him and wanted to know about him. I wanted to go against the ‘norms’ I had grown up in. I was an outsider for many reasons, but most of all my never caring about what someone did in their bedroom. I always saw it then and do even now it’s no one’s business what someone does in their private life. If they’re not hurting themselves or anyone else, then leave people alone.

I’ve said before that of all my character Dante Angeloft is the character, I’ve created I related to the most. Readers of the books will understand deeper if they’re also listening to my interviews and appearances why I’ve said this.

Dante is my middle finger to the world my younger self grew up in. I am glad the world progressed farther since those days, with more acceptance. The journey he goes on is me asking more questions about myself. Abused in his youth, never accepted, and finally went into the world on his own terms. Harvest is all about the world growing bigger for Dante. Him discovering that there is more to the world than he ever expected and him dealing with the damage done to him in his life before.

Though he becomes more damaged in the series, he finds a way to live and continue in it. He is a trooper.

Writing Maxwell Demon was a culmination of a lifetime of polishing my skills in writing up to the point of publishing. I’ve talked about how I had written for years prior. I began developing characters for the series before I knew I’d be using them in it. For sharp eyes, they have noticed old accounts of mine using “The Blasphemer Series” to describe early shared writing pieces. Those pieces never made it into the series itself, but the title of them did.
When I came up with the series’ title, I knew, at least as a teenager, that someone would call whatever I wrote under this umbrella title would be offended. The topics tackled in the series clashed with beliefs held in the household I grew up in and with the communities, my family had been a part of throughout my younger years. Whether it was religious retellings or even sexuality, someone was going to be upset with my work.
I knew then and I know now that I write as a drummer drums their own tune. I write what I’d like to read, what I want to write, and all the while knowing someone somewhere would appreciate my work.
This book is a collective of all the things I knew as a teenager that my peers would’ve never understood, but I hoped I wasn’t alone. Writing was how I coped in my younger years. With some writer’s flair and playing in the sandbox of an empty document awaiting to be filled, I infused a great passion amongst the pages. This passion was religious studying, not just reading the Bible, but studying cultures and any religious book and historical references I could get my hands on. This is where I questioned things I read.
Questioning things is still to this day how I write and fix plot holes and develop my characters and stories. Why would someone do that? Why wouldn’t they? Very simple questions and researching for answers. I used this throughout this book. What does Hell really look like? Is it all brimstone and fire or something more familiar? What would be more disturbing, something not that far from the world one knows or something so bizarrely different it was unimaginable? Beautiful questions, that’s just my belief.
This is a story of redemption and reincarnation. Though reincarnation is for the betterment of the soul, it also held this terrifying idea to me. Living over and over, forgetting what happened in the previous life, and never knowing if you’re on the ‘right’ path in this one sounded more like a curse than a journey of enlightening to me.
How far would someone go if they truly loved you? A simple question, one deeply rooted in confusion for me growing up in a dysfunctional household, how I did. People that love you shouldn’t hurt you. I knew this much, but I never witnessed this, but I did dream of it. Meeting someone that would love me for me was foreign, but throughout the writing, I could imagine a world or many where this was answered. For Maxwell, the main male in Maxwell Demon, it was a never-ending journey to seek out his true love and be there for them.
I never really called this book a romance. It has a love story interwoven, but it’s much more than that for me. I knew it was a dark fantasy, but eventually, I learned it was horror. As I began working on it in 2014, I became stuck and put it on the back burner for a few months until 2015, when I finished it. During this break from this project, I wrote Human Ouija.
I had always thought The Blasphemer Series would be the one to get me the most ‘hate’, but it wasn’t, it was Human Ouija. During an event for its release, a guest was approached online by a family member of theirs telling them to go to church and to stop writing ‘books like that’. This was brought to my attention by the guest as it was unfolding behind the scenes. Human Ouija has always been a story about two things. How far would you go for someone you love and miss and a warning about dabbling in things that you don’t understand. See the irony? I did.
Judgment has happened all my life. I’m too fat. I’m too skinny. I need to smile more. Too much make-up or too little. I’m not enough of this or too much of this is the theme throughout a day in the life of Lynn Lesher, the woman behind the pen name L. Bachman (me). It’s always been from people that don’t get to know me or genuinely ask about my books. It’ll always happen, and I accepted that when I was still a little girl. If I had a favorite of all the judgments cast upon me, those who do not write telling me my work is ‘easy to do’.
Maxwell Demon was a challenge on many levels for me. Emotionally accepted that it was taking a big step forward onto a path I had always wanted to go down. Technically, I worried about how I would construct and tell a story I’d be proud of. I also wondered if it would even matter, of course, it did, but for a fleeting moment, I thought it wouldn’t until it did.