Why I Wrote the First Three Badari Warriors Books

From the Archive…I originally wrote this post in 2019, when I was getting the Badari Warriors VOL 1-3 box set ready to release. I thought it might be fun now to go back in time and see what I had been thinking when I started the Badari Warriors series. (AYDARR came out in 2017.) I do remember I wasn’t even sure if I could write a whole series and I thought it might go five books…of course now we’re up to 21 books plus the Badari Gladiators spinoff and I’m so grateful to my readers for embracing the series and the Badari!

I wanted to tackle writing an actual series where each novel has a different couple front and center in the story, but the other characters show up in the story too. My Sectors SF Romance series is more of a connected series, all being set in the Sectors and with some characters mentioned in more than one book, plus a few direct sequels. But for this New Allies series, I had to come up with a longer running story arc that could stretch over many books before the conflict is resolved, but not do too much detailed plotting, because my Muse rebels at telling a story where I’ve already figured out too much in advance. I lose the desire to write it all down then.

I’ve long been a fan of the Lora Leigh Breeds series and the Laurann Dohner New Species series, both centering around genetically engineered soldiers. I can’t ever get enough of those stories! So I decided to challenge myself to write my own novels with genetically enhanced warriors as the heroes (for the most part – there are a few Sectors Special Forces guys appearing in the books). The heroines in these first three novels are Sectors women, kidnapped by the evil alien scientists for experimentation.

I thought the concept of these warriors created by alien scientists lent itself to a series arc I could handle and write exciting stories about. I also see a lot of potential for ‘sidequels’ about other characters, that might not advance the main series arc, but which would be fun to tell. It’s going to depend if the readers like the books or not!

One other influence on me when writing AYDARR was the overall feel of the 2010 movie “Predators,” where a group of tough humans wake up in an alien jungle and have to fight to survive, while trying to figure out how to get home to Earth.

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Why I Wrote MATEER

With MATEER, I wanted to keep the series arc moving forward, advancing the overall plot, but I wasn’t done with the idea of a Badari warrior trapped in a lab and the human woman who helps him. There’s such a huge story potential inherent in the situation, which seems hopeless at first glance, but the hero and heroine will find a way out (this is romance – happy endings!). I pondered how Megan, a doctor, would react to being awakened and finding herself a prisoner under threat of really despicable alien experiments – she’d naturally want to use her medical skills to help her fellow humans survive, but not get drawn into offering the enemy even the slightest assistance. And then there’s Mateer, the chief enforcer from the Badari pack, who’s been recaptured, much to the glee of the scientist running the lab. He has plans for Mateer and Megan together.

So while the two are mutually attracted to each other, they feel they have to resist the scientist’s plot designed specifically for them…and then something happens to Megan to totally change up the situation.

I think my biggest challenge for this book in the series was to make Mateer his own man, differentiated from Aydarr, the Alpha in book one. I had to sit and ponder how growing up in the same harsh circumstances as every other Badari would result in his being a unique person, with his own take on life. I also had a bit of fun in the beginning as Mateer envies the Alpha and his mate (from AYDARR’s events), and has confusion about how the whole concept of finding and being a mate works. Not, mind you, the physical aspects, but how to know he’s met the one woman for him and how to impress on her that he’s the one man for her.

With Megan, who is the sister of book one’s heroine, but very different – younger, a doctor rather than a soldier as Jill was – I felt her medical training and knowledge would make her much more cautious about trusting her feelings in the high pressure environment of the Khagrish lab/prison.

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Why I Wrote TIMTUR

Being a somewhat seat of the pants type author, by which I mean I don’t do any detailed plotting or outlining before I sit down and write, in MATEER’s novel in the scifi romance series, Timtur and the human teacher, Lily, were not mates (and they weren’t the featured hero and heroine). By the next book after MATEER, they were already mates and I hadn’t stopped to tell their story but had gone on and written about another couple’s adventures.

Hmmm. I was short changing Timtur and Lily, I had a really good story to tell for the two of them, with some new wrinkles on the overall series plot…what to do? Also complicating the situation was that Amazon won’t let you have a book numbered as 2.5, which may seem trivial, but if I put TIMTUR into the book series as #5 and it really wasn’t, timewise, things could get confusing. (VS: Amazon has pretty much fixed the series numbering problem nowadays.)

I know – author problems!

But readers were asking me what happened with Timtur and the teacher?!

Then I was invited to join a group of scifi romance authors called In The Stars Romance, who were either putting out stories related to their existing series or writing new series for the imprint. It’s a loose association, created mostly to do cross promo and support each other. I thought that would be PERFECT for Timtur, to make him an In the Stars Romance but still a Badari Warrior of course. (VS: To my knowledge this group is no longer active. I really ought to change out the cover to match the rest of the series…)

Numbering problem solved, now to write the story!

With Timtur’s story taking place in the early days after the pack and the humans have escaped the labs of the evil Khagrish scientists, the Badari are still very much figuring out life as free men, and grappling with what it even means to be a mate. (There were no Badari women.) Timtur takes his role as the healer and the man in his generation most closely in touch with their goddess, the Great Mother, very much to heart. He had serious doubts about how to balance his duties to his packmates and making a commitment as a mate to one human woman. Lily meanwhile has stepped in to try to create a school for the young Badari boys also rescued from the labs. (The group is hiding out in a ‘sanctuary valley’ guarded from the Khagrish enemy by an ancient Artificial Intelligence.) She grows understandably frustrated with Timtur’s reluctance to commit to her…and then there’s an unfortunate incident, she has a stalker amongst the Badari…and she’s kidnapped.

I try to make each book in the series different, to keep the concepts fresh and intriguing. For this one I had a really twisty turn on the relationship between at least a few Badari and a Khagrish scientist – no spoilers, but Lily gets caught up in the situation and Timtur realizes nearly too late that he should have claimed his mate when he had the chance.

It was an interesting challenge to make myself ‘go back in time’ in the series, to the early days when the Badari and the humans were just beginning to figure out life as rebels and as refugees hiding in the sanctuary valley on the planet far from the human interstellar civilization, the Sectors. I hope the readers will enjoy seeing how Lily and her alien healer became mates (forgive the title but the In The Stars Romance group goes for the Harlequinesque titles).

The action in TIMTUR does come immediately after the events in MATEER.

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Links for the ebook box set of the first three novels in the series: