The title came first.
I’ve always loved time travel stories. I mean, I’m obsessed with them. You give me a good time travel story and I’m a happy guy. Give me a mediocre one, and I’ll deal with it. Give me a bad one and I’ll figure, Well, at least it was a time travel story.
The title “Yesterday Again” wouldn’t leave my mind. It was perfect for a time travel yarn, right?
In the very first Archvillain, I made a reference to Kyle trying to build a time machine. I knew that one day — in some book — he would succeed and travel in time. Now, I had originally signed on to write three books and two were done. I was hopeful that the publisher would want more than three, but no one had said anything yet. I figured I’d better do the time travel story now, just in case.
When deciding where/when in the past Kyle would go, I settled on the time of my own childhood — the 1980s. 1 That worked out such that Kyle’s parents would be his age, which meant I could have some fun with a generational storyline. Throw in the idea of a 21st century kid trying to navigate the pre-internet age, and I was happy to get started.
The first draft of the book flowed. Not as easily as The Mad Mask, but pretty easily.
Then, my editor gave me the bad news: The publisher didn’t want any more Archvillain books. This would be the last one.
Anticipating further adventures, I had actually left Yesterday Again very open-ended. But that just wouldn’t be fair to the readers. So I dug back in, added in some more material, and rounded out the story so that Yesterday Again could act as a finale.
If you’re interested in what could have been, stay tuned for an upcoming installment of “Stories I Never Told,” in which I’ll peel back the curtain a bit on how I had intended to continue the Archvillain saga!