I had also decided to tell the story of what happened to Garth’s mother. I had very briefly touched on it in Missing Parents, but now, I had more ideas for more detail and really wanted to tell that part of the story too. First, I had to introduce Garth’s mother before she died so the readers could establish some kind of connection to her and over the course of writing the second chapter, I found myself emphasizing that Garth had a very special bond with his mother, which I knew would make her death even more painful.

Since this was essentially Humphrey’s origin story, I couldn’t not include his very first time logboarding. And with that, I decided to include the part about his father spinning the logboard around with his back paw, making that same move Humphrey does in the original movie, something he learned from his father, although he didn’t remember it. I did go back and change the opening paragraph of the story, to the opening of the legend that I had described at the end of Legend.

Now, originally, “Stampede of Fate” was chapter four and “Learning to Howl” was chapter five, but then I noticed that there was problem with this. In “Stampede of Fate”, Clara dies sometime in the summer, “Learning to Howl” takes place in the winter, and then Tony returns to Garth in the summer, meaning he stayed away for a whole year after Clara’s death which didn’t make sense.

So, I simply switched them out, making “Learning to Howl” chapter four, and “Stampede of Fate” being chapter five, meaning that after the winter where Humphrey learns to howl, Tony and Clara go on the hunting trip and she dies. Then that same summer, Humphrey and Kenya are kidnapped by the humans and Tony meanwhile returns to Garth.

Teaching Humphrey to howl was another big thing I wanted to include. He had a chapter with his father, now he needed a chapter with his mother. Having his mother be the one to teach him how to howl unintentionally may have created an explanation for why Garth couldn’t howl in the original movie.

Having Humphrey’s mother teach him to howl implied, at least to me, that the females of the family taught the pups to howl, while the males mainly taught them to hunt or have fun depending on if they were alphas or omegas. Since Garth’s mother had died, he didn’t have anyone to teach him and that’s why he couldn’t howl in the first movie.

I had some trouble filling up Stampede of Fate. I knew Garth’s mother was going to die, I even knew how, but I couldn’t fill the chapter up with enough content. Before starting A Hero’s Past, I had told myself that I would make every chapter have at least 1,000 words since a ton of chapters in Legend were really short, (even though I did end up combining them into one big chapter). I eventually decided to get really dark and ended up horribly burning one of the wolves in the hunting party and used the gruesome detail to draw out the chapter.

It was around this time that I had a thought that would change everything. I love psychological villains; villains who fight with their intellect. And I realized I never had the chance to include one in the franchise, and I deeply regretted it. So much so, that I broke the promise I made to myself that Legend would be the last sequel and decided to do two more.

However, for consistency’s sake, I’ll talk more about that when we get to it. For now, all I’ll say is that I had planned for my psychological villain to secretly be behind everything, always trying to get to Humphrey throughout the entire franchise and made it so that he was responsible for Humphrey being taken from his parents.

So, I went back through the chapters and secretly placed him in every spot where Humphrey was. Watching the wolves during his birth, or when he went logboarding, or when he learned to howl. I then moved on to the moment of truth. The day Humphrey was taken from his parents, which was fairly easy to do since everything had pretty much already been written when Humphrey had his life flash before his eyes before he died in Legend.

The decimation of his pack afterwards was fun to write as I had planned to have a sort of comedic friendship between Steven and Adam in my new two-parter I was planning, and I got to start that relationship in chapter nine. I also got to introduce a wolf who absolutely hates humans named Mick who is also used for some comic relief in my new sequels.

While he was supposed to be just comic relief, I realized later that it didn’t make sense for him to really hate humans for absolutely no reason, so when I was writing Rise of the Hunter, I put in that his wife had been mercilessly killed by one and it’s the only time where my new villain wasn’t responsible for something like that, since he hadn’t yet started hunting wolves. Although, I ended up changing that too and made it so that it was Viggo who killed her, and it was his first kill.

I was slowly beginning to piece my new villain’s story together and had decided that he hated wolves, especially Humphrey’s pack, because Humphrey’s grandparents had killed his mother and father when he was just a boy. His plan to take Humphrey and Kenya from them failed and when he returned to their pack, he found Humphrey’s grandfather dead and kills his parents in a fit of rage.

Adam was in the protection of the pack and Kenya had already been adopted so Humphrey was the only one left for him to go after. His persistence on pursuing Humphrey even after A Hero’s Past would be driven by his increased anger that Humphrey constantly managed to get away from him and now on top of vengeance, the villain was now motivated by not wanting to simply give up on getting Humphrey because he saw that as accepting defeat, something that I drew from my own personality because I never give up on most things that frustrate me because I see it as accepting defeat.

The irony is, the villain later makes a quote that completely contradicts this way of thinking of his. He says in The Final War, “accepting defeat is the most difficult but necessary part of competition.” Normally, this would be an inconsistency in his character, but instead, it shows his growth since he says it many years after A Hero’s Past when he’s learned to calm down a bit and be more patient.

Chapter ten was originally supposed to be much darker. I originally called it “Beaten” and intended for it to be about how horrible Kenya’s life was as a pet but felt that would be way too dark. So, I changed the title to, “A Turn for the Worst” and lightly hinted that she was being abused.

When I drew my cover for Legend, it included Kenya, Humphrey, and Adam. I had decided to give Adam a claw mark scar on his shoulder and neck and decided to give to him the one on his shoulder when he was pup. I figured there would be someone in the pack who didn’t like that he was leader and would attack him. I decided to make that wolf be Steven since it would make their relationship in the new sequels better, as they still didn’t quite get along in the new sequels, but still tolerated each other. By this point, there had been a pack in every region of Jasper except for the Southern Region. But we knew that there was a Southern Pack since they were mentioned in the third movie, so I decided that Steven would leave the pack and go on to form the Southern Pack.

The chapter about Humphrey’s time in the forest was my absolute favorite to write. I knew that if my psychological villain, who I decided to name Viggo, would surely catch Humphrey if he was alone. So, I decided to give him a companion that he lived with during his time in the woods. When deciding what creature to pick, I remembered that Humphrey was called a coyote in the first movie, and I thought it would be a fun reference if we had an actual coyote that mistook Humphrey for a coyote pup. As for his name, I was watching The Terminator one night and decided on Arnold. Of course, I had to make sure he said, “I’ll be back” at some point and I was able to sneak it into The Final War. I needed filler for the chapter, and to further develop Humphrey and Arnold’s relationship, so I decided to include a fox, too, whose prank against them backfires.

I eventually had to get rid of Arnold but knew he would return for the grand finale in The Final War. So, I had him get stuck in a bear trap that Viggo set for them. Humphrey leaves Arnold who gets released by Viggo so he can turn up later on down the road. Figuring out Viggo’s reason for this was really easy. At this point in time, Humphrey is the only one he’s interested in, so he doesn’t care about some random coyote.

While I was proofreading A Hero’s Past, I realized something cool about this part of chapter 12. I unintentionally used Alfred Hitchcock’s bomb theory. I had a little section where I talked about Viggo setting up the bear trap by the lake before writing the part where Humphrey and Arnold fall into the trap. If I just continued the story and they suddenly came across the bear trap, yeah, that would be a surprise. But with the section about Viggo setting up the trap, now the readers know it’s there and are anxious and worried about Humphrey and Arnold as they approach the trap.

Of course, Humphrey gets caught in the storm and pinned down by the tree and rescued by Kyle and Owen. I originally planned for Nars to be the wolf who objects to Owen taking Humphrey in, but I realized that wouldn’t work since he lost to Kate during The Great Wolf Games when they were both pups, which meant that since Kate was still a pup at this time, Nars would be too, so it wouldn’t make sense for him to be an adult wolf here.

One thing I feel the need to address is the concept of alpha school in the movies. It’s a concept that I had to try and work around and come up with a good explanation for since the rules regarding it differ a lot between stories. The thing I came up with is that, like school systems in real life, the specifics of alpha school differ from pack-to-pack, i.e., the age of the wolf when they start, how long the training lasts, things like that. The constant is that all alphas, at some point in their lives, go through it.

The rest of the story was pretty straightforward as it had all been pre-determined. Then I got to the moment when Kate and Humphrey first met. After writing that, I was able to quickly finish the story and decided to have the epilogue cross over with the beginning of the first movie.