When Richard Stephens was 17 years old, he dreamed up an entire fantasy world about a lost hero.

That was back in 1982, and for years after, the Cambridge man tried to put pen to paper and bring his story to life.

But it wasn't until 2017, more than 30 years later, when Stephens retired from the Waterloo Regional Police Service, that he was really able to focus his attention on writing. A year later, Soul Forge was born.

Since then, Stephens has written and published a whopping 14 books set within his epic fantasy universe. He is currently working on book number 16.

Stephens spoke with The Morning Edition's host Craig Norris about his work.

Craig Norris: You started to write your first story back in the 1980s. Why did it take you so long, more than 30 years to bring Soul Forge to life?

Richard Stephens: I started Soul Forge in 1982 and I was getting ready to go to work as a young man. I was expecting a son when I was 18. In the interim, I had five kids and I had two careers and writing for me it was just a pastime. It was just something I did when I could eke out a little bit of time. So I never really had a lot of time for myself with them at that point.

Craig Norris: What spurred this love of writing for you?

Richard Stephens: Back when I was a child in 1974, we didn't have the Internet and everything else like that. So I was bored on summer vacation one day and I had a Hardy Boys book sitting beside me and I loved the Hardy Boys and I'm thinking, 'You could write one of those.' So I set out on my old Underwood 88 typewriter and I started writing my own version of the Hardy Boys.

Then in '77 I saw Star Wars and that inspired my love of science fiction. So I wrote a book about me and my friends going off to save the galaxy and my homeroom teacher was a Darth Vader-like character.

In 1980, I read The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks and I've never looked back. In 1982, when I was getting ready to go to work, the song Run to the Hills came on the radio and for some reason it just put the Soul Forge universe in my head.

Craig Norris: Since retiring you've managed to write 15 books. Where does this drive comes from to continue creating stories with the Soul Forge universe?

Richard Stephens: Someone's asked me if I'll ever write outside this universe and I don't think I will. Every time I write a book a wizard will say something and all of a sudden I've got to write about that. So every time I write a book, I generally get two more in my head, and I always know the beginning and the end of. I just have to figure out the pages in between.

Craig Norris: Are you sometimes surprised by what your characters say?

Richard Stephens: Oh, absolutely. The original Soul Forge, it took me 35 years to write the first book. It took 36 years to get to the end of the trilogy, and I always knew the ending of that trilogy, and it did not involve the dragon.

But halfway through the writing of the third book, one of the two main characters integral to the ending, did something so bizarre that he was no longer involved in the ending, and my ending was gone. So 36 years later I had no ending and entered the dragon.

Craig Norris: You said that you left the police force because of the stress the job was putting on you. Talk a bit about that.

Richard Stephens: It takes a very special person to work in any of the emergency services, especially policing and paramedics that go through a lot too. I remember that whenever we had something going on, we were always happy to see the paramedics show up so we could back off.

But you need to be a special type of person and I'm not that special type of person. And it took me 12 years to realize that that job's not for me as much as I like serving the community. I just worked in the courts, I didn't work on the street but it's still very stressful dealing with some of the people we have to deal with on a daily basis and I couldn't wrap my head around anything else.

I just knew what was going to happen tomorrow. I knew what my day potentially could be like and I couldn't function very well and my writing suffered as a result.

Craig Norris: What was it like once it was all over?

Richard Stephens: The writing was actually almost a way to step away from it because I used to get an hour paid lunch and I'd go into the cafeteria down at the bottom of the courthouse and that was my escape. So I would immerse myself for an hour in my writing but I couldn't actually write because my mind was too preoccupied.

Craig Norris: The Soul Forge universe goes down a lot of different paths. There's a lot of different worlds. Just give us a sense though of some of the stories within that universe?

Richard Stephens: Oddly enough it was never supposed to be dragons. So in 1982, I remember thinking to myself that I will never write about dragons because everyone does that. I do not want to be that person. And at the end of that book in that series, when that character did something so bizarre that wasn't involved, the dragon showed up and it just opened up my whole universe.

And I've gone back 1,200 years to basically write The Rise and Fall of Dragon, so some books are very dragon and elves and dwarf dominant and some books don't have Dragons in them at all. It depends on what's happening in the timeline.

Craig Norris: Tell me about the name Soul Forge. Where did that come from?

Richard Stephens: When you meet my first hero he's 45 years old. He's an embittered drunk who wants nothing to do with society. But if you would have known him, my name was younger. He was the most benevolent person you'd ever meet. You could bump into him and he'd say, excuse me, he just saw the good in everything.

While he was out saving the kingdom, when he was a young man, he came home after the war was over and found out that his family was slaughtered. And so while he was saving everyone else's lives, no one bothered to save his family. So he shuns society from that point on and he just stepped away.

And when you first meet him, the king needs him back but their only fear is that if they bring him back into the fray, that he might end up killing them all instead of solving the problem they're facing.

So it's all about him reforging his soul, because he was such a benevolent person as a young man, but when you first meet him, he's not benevolent at all.

Craig Norris: You are now in the process of writing book number 16. Do you have any idea how many books you have left in you?

Richard Stephens: I got another 20 books in my head and it seems like every time I write one, I get two more. So I don't think there'll ever be an end. But the nice thing is Soul Forge Saga, the last trilogy, that's the first one I wrote, is actually the end of my universe, so it's already done. So if something happens to me tomorrow, my readers don't have to worry.

Craig Norris: With so many books in this universe, what's a good entree for people? What's a good entry point?

Richard Stephens: I always recommend you should start chronologically, it just makes sense to me. So you start with Keeper of the Jewel because it takes place 1,200 years before Soul Forge. Some people like reading publishing order, but all my trilogies are independent, they all stand on their own. So you can pick up any trilogy in my universe and it's like watching a movie.

You're going to the movie in book one, book two, you're watching the movie. Book three, you leave the movie, you're happy, the story is over, but you can go back in time, forward in time.

Every trilogy is not dependent on what happens before or after, but there is a loose thread that ties the whole universe together.