Charles Mandrake is a pen name. I’m a real person. I’m the author of this series, and these books are my only works.
I live currently in the Midwest United States and live a very normal life. No one has ever thought I’d write a book, and for now, I want to keep it that way around certain circles.
Here is the process and the thoughts behind the series.
The Charles Mandrake Origin
Charles Mandrake was just a name. It came to me years ago. I just didn’t know what to do with it then. It sat with me because I didn’t know how to write a novel, and didn’t take the time to learn. That could have been ten years prior to this all happening. Maybe more.
Charles never represented anything to me in the past. he was just a name. I liked the fact he had Mandrake as a last name, and the only thing I was sure of was that he was wealthy in some respect. Anna Ko, didn’t arrive until June, 2025, and Todd showed up without a last name in either September or October. Together they became an inseparable trio. As a trio, they became me to some extent.
At first, I didn’t really have a story. I built more of the scaffolding then. The first iteration of Charles and Anna happened in June 2025, and it was some kind of unfinished survival and disaster story that never made it past chapter one. In essence, it was the wrong story for them.
I don’t know how Skelderheim came to be either. It just did. I do know that it started with just Charles moving into the observatory, and living in a fantasy Maine coastal town. The thing I do remember is that it all started clicking into place fast. The town gained the name East Bay, and Skelderheim just clicked because at the time, I wanted something that sounded kind of like a mix of Viking and Germanic origins. The funny thing is that the first iterations of chapter one are pretty similar. I had the story, but here’s the thing. I found AI. AI supplied the writing knowledge that I didn’t have. It was able to take my horrible writing and coach me how to make it into something usable, and when that first version of chapter one got dialed in, I knew that this was going to be my “long-term project.”
AI has very negative connotations when people hear it’s used. “AI slop” is one of the best and broadest terms to describe what AI is thought of today. I am constantly struggling with this: Am I actually a writer if AI is generating the story and then I go in and edit it to my tastes?
Am I an Architect, an Author, or a Writer?
Here’s a better thought (As of when this document was originally written in April 2026, right before I switched to 100% human writing in Book 3): I am a story architect.
Charles Mandrake is first and foremost, a worldbuilding control system. I have dozens of canon files that control the world and pretty much everything in it. I have instructional files for the LLMs that provide guardrails for what they can and can’t do, what they must follow, and where they can invent things.
I have the vision of the story and everything in it. I created the concepts of “time duality”, the Line, and Orra-Kai, all without magic. I modified the concept of family and kinship as a claim that can be made rather than bloodlines. Finally, I made the world feel real, like you could actually go there and live there because the mechanics work. Everyone works for coin (money).
There are always costs involved, and no one is just “the chosen one.” I also intentionally stayed away from tropes and romance, and love triangles, commonly found in YA crossover novels these days.
In the end, most authors that use AI don’t talk about how much editing they have to do if they value their output. About 80% of the time I’ve spent on the books was endlessly editing the story into something I wanted. AI provided a structure, a backbone, but in the end, the story you read is the result of hours and days of grueling editing.
The world has a rich backstory, the city has a horrifying history, the people have beliefs, faith, and morals. They aren’t NPCs on the page, but live and breath alongside the protagonists.
Am I a writer then? I was a world architect and author. As of Book 3 (now May 2026), when I started writing the chapters myself because I’d built up the confidence to do so without AI, that’s when I said, “I’m a writer”.
I have seen what AI produces when unrestricted. It comes from generic prompts like, “write me a fantasy novel about X, who falls in love with Y, somewhere in a fantasy middle-ages world.” That’s what produces generic AI slop.
I found very quickly that when I add guidance, rules, and canon, the AI becomes a powerful tool that assist you in your writing rather than building a generic fantasy story for you.
So what do I mean by that?
I didn’t build the first 2.5 Charles Mandrake books by just prompting and seeing what comes back. Charles Mandrake is authored through a story architecture system.
That means the series runs on extensive canon, scene purpose, POV control, and revision rules that keep the books and all other works consistent over time. This ensures that the work stays grounded, coherent, and recognizable as itself no matter how big it gets.
The Charles Mandrake story architecture system
The Charles Mandrake story architecture system is what gives me control where prompting alone cannot. Prompting can give me pages in the most generic form, but it cannot reliably protect continuity, character behavior, tone, or long-term structure across multiple books, side chapters, and other works that fall under the Mandrake brand.
The architecture system does that. It gives me a working structure built from canon, authoring rules, instruction files, and revision controls that helps me catch contradictions early, rebuild weak chapters without losing the deeper identity of the series, and keep the story from drifting into something generic.
Charles Mandrake only works if it feels like the same world every time you return to it.
What proved the value of the system even more is that it did not stop at the novels. It was able to extend into side chapters and print-and-play story games without losing the world’s identity. That showed me I had not just built a way to draft chapters. I had built a story architecture system that could carry world logic, character truth, continuity, and tone across different formats. The format can change, but the underlying structure still holds. That was when I understood I was not just trying to write a series. I was building something designed to live beyond the page.
Why a Trio, and why is Charles not even the main protagonist?
Charles, Anna, and Todd work because they are not interchangeable. Each one changes the shape of the story, and each one changes who the others are when they are together. That is why the trio feels whole. You aren’t just watching three characters share scenes across a series of books. You are watching a bond form that creates something larger than any one of them could carry alone.
The trio also works because they cover different human needs in the story. They do different emotional jobs. They also change the tone of the world around them. Charles brings one kind of center, Anna, a different focus, Todd another view and humor, and when those are combined, the story gets range. It can hold quiet, conflict, humor, care, pressure, and belonging without feeling forced, and it’s not being handled by just one character.
Charles, Anna, and Todd aren’t built from people I know per se, at least, not on a one to one basis. They have bits of friends, relatives, and people that I’ve met over the years, but it’s more shared than anything else.
It’s much the same as when Bill Watterson said that Calvin and Hobbes weren’t really created from people he knew either. Yes, all my characters have traits from people, but none are built from a specific person (a couple started that way, but soon veered off into their own personalities).
The World (Central Expanse) and Skelderheim in General
Skelderheim isn’t a fantasy world that I built as a kid’s fantasy escape when I was young. I didn’t even make it exist until Charles Mandrake became a solid work. In the beginning, the whole story was supposed to happen in only East Bay as more of a “Lake Woebegone” type of story where nothing really happened but people lived their lives.
Skelderheim came first with the idea that the observatory was more than just an observatory. The portal happened, and then Skelderheim just materialized on the other side. It didn’t go through different names or anything either, but for almost the entire first book, as I was writing, the whole other world was just the city. Then it expanded.
The world became the Central Expanse with tribes, lands, and different people, but all on this massive steppe continent. Then when Klebber, a merchant shop owner had to stock coffee because the trio drink copious amount of it in the series, he needed to get it from somewhere, and the South lands were created. Finally, pressure from the hunters materialized in book two, but where did they come from. Initially it was the west, but that was abandoned, and they just kind of exist in the story, not fully realized. What is clear, is that I can keep the brand going for a very long time with different story spinoffs for as long as I want.
But Where Is This Going?
In the end, I know it will be much the same as Watterson’s closure of the Calvin and Hobbes strip. When I am done, and the world has told all there is to tell, I walk. That’s as simple as it is. I don’t want to run Skelderheim to the ground. When it ends, there will be plenty of story that could be told, but it’s done when it feels complete to me.
– Charles Thaddius Mandrake
Pen Name for the Author