Some other themes...

There are also some parts in my book that contain glimpses of the afterlife. Just glimpses though, not full-fledged "Oh look at this, this is what happens when you die!" type stuff. For example, In one of the scenes in the second book of the series, Julius comes very close to death when he gets caught in a winter storm. When he falls unconscious in a snow bank, he sees his father (who has been dead for many years). However, with all of the strange things like this that happen in the book, I leave them open to interpretation. One could say Julius was just dreaming, or one could say that he was in between life and death and saw something real. I want to make sure that nobody is going to yell at me for saying something that may be against their beliefs...

Another theme in T.P.K. is death. Sweet and simple. I guess my books constantly have death in them, and at the end of the series I think the message is not to fear death, that it comes for everyone, and is more of a blessing than a curse at times. I mean, Artemis cursed himself to live forever so that he would never have to die and possibly find out that Myra was unfaithful to him, and also because he did not want to have to face the verdict for all his sins, however good his intentions were... but the thing was, he regretted it. Nobody should live that long. Things begin to blur, everything blends together until nothing is new ad you grow tired of the world. He tried to commit suicide on multiple occasions, but he couldn't bring himself to follow through with it because he knew that somewhere out there Julius was still alive. The only thing that kept him going through those 600 years was finding Julius, and making things right no matter what the outcome, which he realized was probably his own death.

There are other, more *ahem* pleasant themes in my books as well, such as how in the second book Julius falls in love, and also in the fourth book when the theme of forgiveness is ever-present.

I think; however, that the most important, overall theme of the whole series is the celebration of life.