What Jelvia Became When Romance Was No Longer Enough

When I began writing Jelvia, I had a clear entry point in mind. A human woman meets an alien man. She falls for him. He is dangerous and not meant for her. The tension sits there, in attraction complicated by fear and power.

That shape is familiar for a reason. It works. It gives the reader something recognisable to hold on to while the world around it grows stranger. The first book leans into that expectation. A human perspective. An alien presence. A relationship that feels charged because it shouldn’t exist.

At the time, I thought that was the story.

What I hadn’t anticipated was how quickly that framework would begin to strain under the weight of everything else the series was doing.

As the books progressed, the alien stopped functioning purely as a romantic other. He accumulated history, responsibility, and guilt. The invasion itself shifted from being an external event to something embedded in memory, language, and systems people had already accepted as normal. The story became less about first contact and more about what happens after contact has been absorbed, justified, and quietly rewritten.

Romance didn’t disappear, but it stopped being sufficient as the primary lens.

That was the first real fracture point. I could either keep smoothing the story back into the shape I had originally promised, or allow it to follow the logic it was already establishing. The latter meant accepting imbalance. It meant some books would lean heavily into intimacy, while others would step away from it almost entirely.

Macy and Narcifer’s storyline carries the strongest romantic spine in the series, particularly in books one and four. Their relationship matters. It changes outcomes. It holds emotional weight because it exists under pressure from forces neither of them fully controls.

Outside of that arc, the focus widens.

Beth’s story is less concerned with romantic fulfilment and more concerned with power, consent, and survival. Courtney and Aldarn’s story is where the reader begins to realise that something is fundamentally wrong with the Jelvian world.

This was the point where I had to stop playing safe.

Developing the Wake Up Movement meant widening the lens further. James, Phil, Oliver, and Calder were not added to soften the story but to expose it. Their presence makes the system visible. It removes the comfort of seeing events through a single emotional relationship.

Continuing to present the series as a straightforward alien romance would have been easier. It would have aligned more cleanly with reader expectations. It would also have required softening characters, simplifying consequences, and pretending that affection alone could counterbalance systems designed to control and erase.

That was no longer the story I was willing to write.