Why I wrote them

Before the Register was an encyclopaedia, it was a game.

When I started all this, in October 2025, I was building the setting for a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. There was no magic in it and there were no dragons: just the rules, and an alternate America for the players to get into trouble in. The first draft was under two thousand words, most of them about Arizona, with plot hooks in it for the table. The campaign never got played. Every hook I wrote down needed something behind it, and finding out what was behind it meant building the world, and the building took a year and four hundred articles and got completely away from me.

A campaign is a story you tell at a table with other people, and those stories never got told. The novels are where they went, a year late and on paper instead. None of them is the one I planned.

The rooms the articles cannot go into

The Register is written as a reference work, and a reference work can only tell you what happened. It can tell you who signed, how the vote went, what the bulletin said and who resigned afterwards. It cannot tell you what any of it was like.

The Register can say that a Governor-General in the 1920s asked his ministers what Prohibition was costing. It cannot say what he thought about at one in the morning on the front step of a house in Annapolis, in his dressing gown, with a lantern. It can say that a petition was received in 1775. It cannot put you in the room when the King decided to read it. I wanted to be in those rooms, and the only way in was to write them.

So every chapter opens with a short extract from the Register, quoted exactly as it stands, and then goes into the room the extract was not in.

An easier way in

I know what I have built. Most people are never going to read an encyclopaedia for fun, and I am not sure I would either if I had not written this one. A story is a door. You can read any of these books without having opened the Register at all, and by the end you will know the world anyway, because the extracts teach it to you a paragraph at a time and the chapters show you why it matters. If you want the rest afterwards, every chapter ends with the entries for the people and places in it.

The characters took over

I planned a war novel. The first book is the Four-Year War, from Lexington to the Peace of Boston, and that is what I thought the series would be: the history of this world, one turning point at a time.

Then a boy turned up. Frederick was a name in a line of succession, and then he was fifteen and had to say something for his father that his father could no longer say, and then I wanted to know what happened to him next: at school, on a class trip, in a village in the Cotswolds, on the wrong bus in Phoenix. Theo turned up with him, and Jack, and a German Emperor who counts things. I did not plan a series about a teenage King and his friends. They arrived, and they stayed, and I have stopped arguing.

Why some of them are comedies

Because the world needed them. After a war, an assassination and a King losing his words, a world that cannot laugh at itself is not a world anybody would believe in. Real history is full of comedy: grape juice at a dinner, a bet nobody should have made, a capsule coming home where the city can see it, a King who cannot prove who he is to a doorman. The funny books are held to the same rule as the serious ones. Nothing in them is allowed to contradict an article, and nothing in them happens that the world would not have let happen.

Who they are for

Mostly for me. I write the book I want to read next, and then I read it. That is the honest answer and I would rather give it than pretend I had an audience in mind.

If you have found your way here and you enjoy them too, that is the best thing that can happen to something written for yourself, and I would like to hear about it. The address is on the note, and the first book is The Olive Branch.

Jacob Ehlers

6 November 2026