When I first started drafting my upcoming The War Within series, this question kept resurfacing.
It began as a question about my main protagonist, Jenny.
As she navigates the figurative minefields of her own home, she starts to question how accurately she sees her own life—and what truths the people closest to her continue to hide.
But the more I wrote, the more I realized the question wasn’t just Jenny’s.
How much of our understanding of ourselves comes from the people who tell us who we are?
For Jenny, that question became impossible to ignore.
The faint sound of the front door opening snapped me from my thoughts. Dad was back. I followed his shuffling steps through the entryway, then into the kitchen. The front door latch hadn’t clicked into place.
One, two, three… Perimeter fail. What is this, amateur hour?
I moved quietly to the stairs, my left leg stiff and painful. I had forgotten my stretches yesterday. Skip the fourth step. Use the right edge on the sixth. Skip the eleventh. I stopped at the threshold. The door had drifted open. Damp air caressed my cheek. Fog reduced visibility to a few drifting meters of gray. So damp and quiet.
Longing tugged at me. To feel the fog surrounding me. To walk alone through the vineyards and orchards, wrapped in clouds and hidden from view.
One minute and counting. The voices from the kitchen were low and indistinct. It would have made sense to close the door, but for all I knew, this was another compliance test.
It was also an opportunity to run my own test. My mouth went dry as I reached my hand across the threshold.
Follow orders!
The subconscious command hit like a sucker punch to the gut. My hand started to shake, and I struggled to breathe. The pounding in my temples when resisting a direct order was nothing new. I pushed through it until the pain subsided, then stepped back and settled on the final step of the staircase.
It’s not time yet. I tightened my plaited, mousy-blonde hair. Until my situation changed and I had access to key documents, I had to be patient.
Five minutes. I frowned at the kitchen door. No instruction or supervision was highly unusual. What had changed in the past twelve hours?
Thought Experiment
Imagine you gradually realize that someone has been deliberately shaping your behavior for years—and you're not sure who you can really trust. You suspect there is more to your situation than what you see on the surface and you aren't able to leave without getting arrested because you have no ID papers.
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There isn’t a clean answer. Every choice has a cost.
Keep going, and you may remain trapped. Test the boundaries, and you may suffer consequences. Pretend to comply, and you become a participant in the deception. Look for a way out, and you risk discovering that escape may be more dangerous than staying.
At what point does survival become its own form of conditioning? What happens when someone notices?
Feeling unsettled?
I certainly am! 😂 But I am here for the twisted mind games—and I hope you are too!
When I first started outlining and drafting The War Within, I kept running into the same problem. There was a figure lurking in the background—someone who seemed to influence Jenny’s decisions even when he wasn’t there. The more I wrote, the more I realized I needed to understand him. Who was he? What shaped him? And how did he become someone capable of having that kind of influence over another person?
So, I did what any perfectly reasonable writer would do.
I started writing his story.
“Stay away from him, Jenny. I mean it.”
A door closed.
The Americans were not here by accident. I had suspected that from the beginning. Too much access. Too much interest in the people around them. I could neither assume nor rule out that they were aware of my purpose here. Either way, I could not afford interference. If they went out tomorrow, I would follow them.
Jenny laughed. “Finally. They’re always preaching to the damned.” She sighed. “I miss isolation already. But at least I have pears and chocolate.”
Her laughter turned into a cough. She recovered quickly, but not quickly enough to hide how weak she was.
“Don’t be late for prayers,” she said, giggling, though her voice was still rough from coughing.
I sat up. She couldn’t possibly know I had been listening. Could she?
I replayed the last few minutes in my head. The window had already been open. I had made no sound. The mirror’s unique angle concealed me. There was no reason she should know.
Which meant one of my assumptions was wrong.
I waited to see if she would say anything else, but she seemed to have retreated further into the room.
And I was late for prayer.
I also made assumptions
I didn’t initially realize how much of a part this re-occurring background character actually plays in Jenny’s story, and that’s how I find myself writing a standalone prequel to The War Within—a story that wasn’t part of the original plan at all. Apparently, some characters refuse to stay in the background—even when it’s exactly where they insist on being.
The tentative publication date for the prequel is October 2026.
This is my first full-length novel, so I’m learning quite a bit as I go—not just about writing a book, but about everything that comes after the words The End. Independent publishing definitely has its own learning curve, and I’m still figuring out the ins and outs of it all. The Kofler Files is part of that process. It’s a place for me to share the stories, characters, questions, discoveries, and occasional rabbit holes that happen along the way—and, hopefully, bring you along for the ride.
So, if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to build a fictional world from the ground up—that draws heavily from life experience—while simultaneously figuring out how on earth to publish it...
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