People sometimes ask me how I know these characters so well. How Marc moves, how Finn thinks, why Knox holds the world the way he does. The honest answer is: I’ve been living with them for a very long time, and the road that brought us here is not the road I expected to be on.
Compass Point started, as many great things do, with a best friend and a very good idea.
It wasn’t quite fanfic. Almost. The plan was something like fanfic — take the characters we loved from something else, keep the best parts of them, round out their edges for a military and PI setting, write the story we wanted to read. My best friend and I were going to build it together. And we started to. But somewhere in the building, something shifted. Our characters started feeling more real to us than the ones we’d borrowed them from. They started making their own decisions, developing their own histories, wanting things the originals never wanted. So we changed the names. Changed most of what there was to change. And they became ours.
We kept writing together. Forty-five books, shorter than they are now, built across years of loving these characters and needing to tell their stories. And then something wonderful and slightly chaotic happened, as it tends to when creative people spend enough time together: we both kept growing, but in different directions. The universe we’d built together started morphing — shifting from gritty ex-military PI territory into something altogether more magical. Magical realism crept in, as it does, and the original stories began to change shape around it.
Except the boys had opinions about that.
Marc and Finn and Knox, bless them, did not want to change. They had been built in a particular world and they intended to stay in it, thank you very much. So my friend and I had a conversation, and she gave me something extraordinary — she told me to keep them. Keep what I’d written, make it fully mine, release it as my own work.
And here is the part I love most: we are still writing together. The original stories, the ones that started all of this, are still being written — now with that magical realism woven through them, now with the universe we’ve both been building. We didn’t part ways. We just found we had two sets of stories to tell instead of one.
The gift of it, beyond the obvious, was this: I arrived at my new beginning already knowing these people down to the bone. I don’t have to think about how Marc will react under pressure or what Finn will sacrifice without being asked or how Knox loves — fiercely, quietly, with his whole chest. I just know. The way you know the people who have been in your life long enough to become part of your furniture.
So I took those forty-five books, already written and already loved, and I started making them into what they always deserved to be. Deeper. Fuller. Given the space their stories actually needed. The first ten are completely finished and working through their final edits. The next ten are close — they need a little adjustment because some of the earlier outcomes have shifted, the way they do when a series grows into itself and you have to go back and make the foundations match the building. Books twenty to thirty are fleshed out and need a little more attention. Series four is all there in first draft, waiting for the polish that’s coming.
It’s a long road. But I know exactly who I’m travelling it with — both the characters who refused to leave, and the friend who let me keep them.
These people are real to me in a way that defies easy explanation. Not real in a worrying way — I know the difference between a character and a person. But real in the way that matters for writing: I understand them. I love them. I would go to considerable lengths to do right by them.
That’s what Compass Point is. That’s why it’s more than just a series.
— Avery
Avery Beckett Books 
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