I originally intended to have a two-part finale and one plus stand-alone. The scrapped stand-alone was titled Newest Additions and was meant to explore the time during Kate’s pregnancy between the first and seconde films and the origin of the Rogue Wolves. But I didn’t have enough ideas and eventually scrapped it and turned my two-part finale into a final trilogy. However, I still consider the basic plot from Newest Additions to be canon and still included it in my timeline.

I decided to bring Humphrey back pretty much right away since he was the main character, and it wouldn’t feel like Alpha and Omega without him. But, since this was a very closely guarded secret, whenever I would talk about a moment that had Humphrey in it, I had to replace “Humphrey” with “the pups”. I knew that after all these white lies, people would be excited to see the pups on their own, which was another reason why I turned it into a trilogy. Adding a third story with an enemy the pups could handle would montrer how well they could handle themselves before everything went to crap.

par the time I started posting A Hero’s Past, the script for the third installment, The Final War, was complete and I had a pretty complete script for the first and second, The suivant Generation and Rise of the Hunter.

Starting The suivant Generation right in the middle of a battle felt like a cool way to introduce the readers to the older versions of the pups, seeing how they work together right away, as well as introduce the new characters.

I spent a ton of time thinking about what happened to Humphrey during the 17 years he was gone. I had already decided to give Viggo a sister who loved animals, so I decided to have Humphrey stay with her for a time. One day, I went to a zoo and saw the loup exhibit and I thought it would be interesting if Humphrey was in a zoo for part of those 17 years. He eventually escapes and live with Viggo’s sister for the rest of the time until he is attacked par Viggo and decides to return to the pack, which is where we see him at the end of Rise of the Hunter.

My decision to turn Kate and Humphrey’s tanière, den into a sort of old folks accueil went back to when I was coming up with the story for The Final War. I needed something terrible to happen right off the bat to montrer how dangerous Viggo was, and I decided to have Winston, Tony, and Eve be in the old tanière, den and then have Viggo destroy it. I came up with the stories out of order. I was so excited to do this finale right that I used all of my ideas on The Final War and wrote the script for it first and then used whatever ideas didn’t fit into the story to make Generation and Rise.

The Crimson Pack was actually an idea that I got from a fan who suggested that there was this pack of loups who served Viggo called the Crimson Pack, so I decided to use it. I needed a sort of McGuffin for Generation and I decided to make it a red loup since, they’re pretty rare in real life, so I thought it would be cool to have one in the story. Originally, Oscar was supposed to be an Arctic Fox, but I felt like Jasper is a little too far south for that, so I went with a red loup instead. I knew early on that there was going to be this new character who was running from the Crimson Pack after they destroyed his pack, but then I changed it so that Viggo destroyed his pack so we could keep building the mystery around this new human hunter.

Bringing back Fran and Freida was an idea from pretty early on because I wanted to start bringing back some old Friends of the pups since this story was centered plus around them.

Giving Garth and Lilly pups was another idea from early on as well because I had always wondered what it would be like if they had pups. I decided at first to give them two omegas who acted as a sort of comic relief, but then I realized that some people might not like that Garth and Lilly’s pups would kind of act like idiots, especially since so many people wanted them to have pups and I’d seen some fanart and read some stories about it. So, I included Martin as a serious alpha. I also added the part saying that they were trying to do their best as omegas, but just had terrible timing, to make it seem like they weren’t just idiots and were really trying to lighten the mood.

Bringing King and the Rogues back was another early idea because with a story centered around the pups as adults, I knew I had to explore the new relationship with King now that he was good.

While I was proofreading this, I still had some believability issues with trying to make sure the loups didn’t find out that Viggo was the Wolfslayer until the end of The Final War. I had done a good job making sure Oscar never saw Viggo so he wouldn’t easily identify him, but he still gave a description of him and with that description, it was kind of hard to believe that the loups didn’t suspect that Viggo was the Wolfslayer.
I realized that when Viggo attacked Oscar’s pack, getting a good look at him would’ve been the last thing on Oscar’s mind, since he would be plus worried about escaping. So I took a lot of the detail out of his description of Viggo but left a couple of basic things in. That way, it wouldn’t so obviously be Viggo, even if Robert had been pretending to be the Wolfslayer some of the time.

Starting chapter eight was difficult, as I had pretty much no ideas other than the fact that it was going to be about the Crimson Pack invading the Western Pack. I’m not usually a very descriptive writer, but when I get writer’s block, I tend to get very detailed about the environment ou whatever to draw out the chapter, like I did with the burnt loup in “Stampede of Fate” in A Hero’s Past. Pretty much whenever there’s a sudden increase in detail, that means that I had no ideas and was trying to extend the chapter as much as I could. I eventually managed to get started with some dialogue, which is another way I like to draw out a chapter if I’m stuck and was able to finish chapter eight.

It was around this time that I realized Jax, Jonas, Martin were Stinky, Claudette, and Runt’s cousins and I began to wonder what Humphrey’s family arbre must look like, and so I made a family arbre in Paint and decided to add it to the bonus section of the complete collection I had decided to make. It was also around this time that someone gave me the idea of having a snake character and I decided to include one, but plus on that when we get to it.

Going into the climax, I had absolutely no ideas, and I very subtly made that known when I had Stinky say he had no plan because I had no plan for where this chapter was going to go.

I eventually decided to have the Northern Pack help when I realized that I could bring Fleet into it since he was from the Northern Pack. I was able to draw out the chapter a bit with some dialogue and as for the actual battle, I didn’t go into much detail about it since it was just a regular loup vs. loup fight. I had some funny lines of dialogue between Steven and Adam as well as a sort of final “boss fight” with Hammond, Runt and Mick, but in the end, I got through it.

The final chapter was easy as I didn’t have much planned for it and I didn’t want it to be very long. I had to set up Lydia and Runt’s wedding that I had already written for The Final War at the time, so I had him propose to her. Then I moved the story over to the Crimson Pack going back to the General, who I decided to name Robert since he was going to have a bigger role in this final trilogy, and I didn’t want to address him as “The General” the whole time. Anyway, the Crimson Pack goes back to him and even though he can’t understand loup speech, he still gets the message that they failed and decides to get Viggo’s help, which is where Rise of the Hunter picks up.

This story didn’t take very long to write because I really powered through it. I started écriture it as soon as I was done with A Hero’s Past sometime toward the end of the summer and I was done with it par the beginning of October.