Callum and the Other by Alan McClure

 

My first post in this splendid blog, back in September, was about the tribulations of writing a sequel. I had just pressed ‘send’ on a manuscript which had eaten a huge proportion of my time and energy over lockdown, and was feeling reflective: would the book live up to its predecessor? Had I recaptured the voice? Had I repeated myself?

 

Well, I’m pleased to report that readers can judge for themselves this week, as Callum and the Other is finally published on April 15^th. The editing and proofing process was painless, thanks to the fabulous folks at Beaten Track, and generous friends have previewed the book very positively. Does that mean I’m free of pre-publication collywobbles? Of course not!

 

Every Scattered Author must know the strange sense of letting go that comes with publication. The story is no longer mine – it becomes the shared property of anyone who takes the time to read it. There are parts I think are accessible to most readers and parts that will only chime with some. Ideas that struck me as important may well be completely lost in the mix, while aspects that never occurred to me might reveal themselves to insightful readers. It’s a strange and fascinating process, and I’m excited to see where it goes.

 

I hadn’t planned to write a sequel, but now I can’t imagine not having done so. Callum and his friends had more to tell me, and I’m profoundly grateful for the chance to share the results – I hope they entertain, amuse and mystify the brave souls who dip in, and that I can be part of the story’s journey out into the big wide world!

 

Good luck to everyone with new stories to share this month.

 

https://www.beatentrackpublishing.com/?ref=callum

'The end of all things' - finishing a trilogy, by Holly Race

It's been a week since I typed the words 'The End' for the first time on a story that has been tumbling through my head for over a decade. The first draft of the third book of my urban fantasy trilogy, A Midnight Dark and Golden, has been sent to my editor. While I will be working through several further drafts over the next six months or so, it feels very much like the beginning of the end. I cried for a full hour after hitting 'send' on the manuscript (admittedly this may have had something to do with it being 5am at the time and the fact that I had only slept for three hours in the previous two days, but still...).

There have been so many lessons learned in the process of writing these three books, but in many ways I've taken the most interesting ones from writing the final book. Here are a few of the things I wish I'd known before embarking on the trilogy journey:

The fatigue is real

About a third of the way through the draft of the third book, I vowed to never, ever write a trilogy again. You know that point during the drafting process, around 30,000 words in, where you've got past the flush of the 'shiny new story' but haven't yet reached the 'home stretch' and the middle acts feel like the steepest mountain ever? That point felt triply worse for me on this third novel, because it was really 230,000 words in, and I couldn't see my way to get those final 70,000 down on paper. As the final chapters drew closer, the inner editor screamed louder and louder - 'This is your last chance to get it perfect! Only perfection will suffice!' The temptation to watch Love Island instead was very strong indeed.

By the end, though, it's addictive

I may have spent a large portion of writing A Midnight Dark and Golden pledging that this would be my one and only trilogy, but by the end I did a 180 degree turn. There's something intensely satisfying about drawing out multiple character arcs over three books, or 1000 pages. You get the chance to expand smaller characters in ways you hadn't anticipated; you can forge unlikely connections in a way you would be hard pressed to do in a single, 400 page novel. At a certain point, the cast begins to generate their own stories, which is a delightful frustration when you've spent many years attempting to map their journeys in detail across multiple volumes.

You can retcon more than you think

I'm sure there are fantasy authors out there who have the ability to work out every single detail of their world, character arcs and magic system before writing a single word. I'm sure there are fantasy authors out there who not only work these things out, but stick to them as well. I am not one of them. 90 per cent of the best parts of my books came from a sudden realisation that the story would actually be much more exciting if I used a throwaway detail from an earlier novel or chapter and turned it into a world-building or magic-y twist. That, of course, meant throwing away or revising a lot of what I had planned in future chapters, but it was absolutely worth it. And making it fit with previous books is much easier than I thought it would be - who knew that when you're the one making the magic system, you get to invent new rules?

Which leads me on to...

Now you know your characters, trust them

That bit I wrote earlier, about characters generating story? It's absolutely true. After two novels and ten years, you end up knowing your characters pretty well. Would it be weird to say that they know their author pretty well too? By the early chapters of A Midnight Dark and Golden, I could almost hear some of my characters telling me, 'Oi, that trajectory you planned for me eight years ago? That doesn't really fit with the story you're now telling, does it?' Thus two crucial characters who had been on separate, tragic journeys, told me that they would quite like to team up, please and thank you, and one of them would like a happier ending if it wasn't too much bother. It was quite a bother, to be honest, because I'd been writing the conclusions to their arcs in my head for years. However, I heard them out and emailed my editor. She came back to me, as I knew she would, to confirm that the new ending was much more emotional and powerful than my original plan. 'Fine,' I said to my characters, 'You win.' But they were right, and the new ending to their arcs is one of the scenes I am most proud of in the whole trilogy.

Beware nostalgia

Like a back-to-back binge-watch of Ever After, Clueless and Ten Things I Hate About You for a Millennial, my third book was a full-on nostalgia fest. I found myself adding callback after callback to moments in the first two books. I know already that there are too many. I couldn't help myself, and have already briefed my editor to tell me where and when to reign it in. But in the moment, while writing that first draft of the last book, those callbacks were a necessary for me. A way to say goodbye to the characters who have lived in my head for so long, and who are so soon - too soon - going to be flying the nest.

---

Holly Race worked for many years as a script editor in film and television, before becoming a writer.

Her YA urban fantasies, Midnight's Twins and A Gathering Midnight, are published by Hot Key Books.

www.hollyrace.com

A recipe for a YA fantasy sequel - Holly Race

The deadline for the first draft of my second novel is looming, so I'm keeping my post short this month! Here you have it - my very own recipe for writing said sequel:

- Take one (1) Chosen One trope, established in the first novel. Subvert.

- Extract the world building from the first book, add a little more context and lore, knead and allow to rise for a month or two until bubbly.

- Blend plot and character arcs together until thoroughly combined. Add the world building and bring all together in a nice messy gloop.

- Marinade a handful of secondary characters until they are established and likeable. This will be made harder by the fact that you killed off a load of them in your first book and now need to create new ones. Stir into the mixture in the knowledge that only a few will survive to the third book.

- Crack three fight scenes and a battle into the mixture one by one, making sure each of them is more ambitious than those in the first book, despite the fact that when you wrote the first book, you went all in.

- Decide that you don't have enough storylines and decide to include a mystery plot, ostensibly for complexity of flavour but also because you just love a good mystery.

- Add one (or two) romances into the mix, for sweetness, and fold in lightly.

- Bake for a year, turning the temperature up to 'anxiety and panic' for the final week.

- Decorate with a pretty cover and atmospheric blurb, and present next to your first book for comparison and judgement.

Writing under siege by wildlife – Lari Don

I’ve spent most of the last few months, winter and spring, working on the last two books in my Spellchasers trilogy. And due to the inevitable noise and increasingly late bedtimes of the teenagers with whom I share my small terraced house, I’ve done most of that work in the garden shed.

But not on my own. Despite going out there for peace and quiet, I am never alone in my shed.

My small wooden box

The magical world I’ve created in the Spellchasers trilogy is about human beings shapeshifting into animals and birds (and even a few creepy crawlies, in the final book) so the constant presence of creatures in and around my writing space has been occasionally inspiring and sometimes a bit threatening.

My shed backs onto a tree-lined path, so there is almost constant birdsong, which is always lovely. But there are also occasional quarrelling and swooping crows. The baddie in the trilogy is called Corbie (Scots for crow) and he is often aided by his flock of curse-hatched crows. So the clamour and flurry of crows just a few feet away from me as I sit in a thin wooden box has sometimes felt quite threatening, especially when I am in the midst of helping my heroines and heroes defeat a flock of crows. Do they know what I’m writing, I wonder? Are they annoyed about it? Are they about to fly in here? Will they ambush me when I leave?

A helpful cat

Then there are the cats, and the dogs. Both animals feature in the trilogy, usually as a danger to my heroine Molly, who is a part-time hare and an occasional mouse. My own cats regularly try to distract me from writing by lying on manuscripts and draping tails over keyboards. And their wet and muddy pawprints (a cat walking into a shed from a rainy garden and jumping straight onto pg 121, leaves impressive pawprints) can be quite atmospheric in a scene about a girl being stalked by a predator... The cats next door often tap dance, noisily and surprisingly, on the shed roof. And dogs, barking in neighbouring gardens,or being walked on the path behind, can be equally surprising for both me and Molly, especially as her transformations are triggered by the sound of predators.

And then there are the insects, creepy crawlies and mini beasts. I don’t mind the slaters (Scots for woodlice) or the ants or the daddy longlegs or the little beetles with shiny wingcases (in fact, I found a minor role for those jewel-like beetles in the third book, the Witch’s Guide to Magical Combat.) I find the persistence of wasps trying to build their nests in my shed, from the scraped off wood OF my shed, rather admirable - though I do discourage them quite firmly. But I don’t like the spiders. In fact I’m terrified of spiders. I have to check the shed for spiders every single day before sitting down to write. And they still appear. Above my head or in the dark corners... And that constant fear of the suddenly lurking spiders informs every dangerous and tense scene in my adventures.

I’ve not been visited by a toad, wyrm, kelpie or sphinx, but the final book in the Spellchasers trilogy doesn’t go to printer until next month, so there's still time!

So, the wildlife in and around my writing space has definitely added to the writing experience, and influenced the content of my trilogy.

And now that I’m nearly done, I wonder what I will write next, and whether it will contain birdsong, barks and pawprints.

I’m fairly sure there won’t be any spiders. Not as characters, anyway. They may be present as a lingering sense of danger though, lurking in the corners of everything I write...

Do other authors feel that where they write influences what they write?

Lari Don is the award-winning author of more than 20 books for all ages, including fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales, a teen thriller and novellas for reluctant readers. 

Lari’s website 

Lari’s own blog

Lari on Twitter

Lari on Facebook

Three Books, Three Balls In The Air - By Lari Don

I’ve learnt a lot about writing trilogies in the last three years, mostly things NOT to do. (For example, don’t start more subplots in the first two books than you can tie up in the third book. I spent a lot of last year slashing out minor plotlines.)

But I recently discovered something else about trilogies, especially trilogies that your publisher wants to publish in autumn, spring and autumn (ie 6 months apart).

Bringing three novels out in quick succession (even if they are all basically drafted before you start) can mean the writer is experiencing a different point in three different books’ life cycle at exactly the same time. This month, for example, I’ve been promoting Book 1 of the Spellchasers trilogy (The Beginner’s Guide to Curses), dealing with the final edits of Book 2 (The Shapeshifter’s Guide to Running Away) and tackling the first major redraft of Book 3 (The Witch’s Guide to Magical Combat).

This means I’ve been talking to kids about the decisions behind an action scene in one book, while perfecting the language in an action scene in the next book, and trying to decide whether I should radically rework an action scene in the final book.

So the opportunities for getting tangled up in timelines and for blurting out spoilers to classes of 10 year olds are vast and varied! Particularly given that that one of my characters is a different shape, with different powers, in each book...

I’m having to think about each book in a different way. I’m thinking about Beginner’s Guide in terms of introducing the story, performing readings and discussing creative processes. I’m thinking about Shapeshifter’s Guide at a pernickety level, chewing on word choices and punctuation decisions. And I’m thinking about Witch’s Guide in a broad brush way, reducing wordcount and sewing up plotholes. This feels like slicing myself into three separate writers, each doing different things with the same overarching story at the same time...

But being three different writers at the same time is nothing compared to the challenges I regularly set my characters, so I can’t complain! Also, I love chatting to young readers about stories, and I love editing (yes, actually, I do love editing). So this month has contained many of my favourite things about being a writer!

I thought writing the trilogy was the hard bit. It turns out that promoting and editing a isn’t simple either. I’m juggling three books: each at a different stage in its life cycle, each a different weight and shape, each spinning and falling in a different way... I’m just waiting for one of them to bash me on the head!

But the joys of spending all this time with the characters, the magic and the story still outweighs the many challenges of writing a trilogy. (I suspect my next story idea wants to be a trilogy too. I’ll have to get used to keeping timelines untangled, stamping down on spoilers, and keeping all three books in the air!)

The first book in the Spellchasers trilogy, The Beginner’s Guide to Curses, is out now, the Shapeshifter’s Guide to Running Away will be out in spring 2017, and the Witch’s Guide to Magical Combat will be out in autumn 2017, all published by Floris Books.

Lari Don is the award-winning author of more than 20 books for all ages, including fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales, a teen thriller and novellas for reluctant readers.
Lari’s website 
Lari’s own blog 
Lari on Twitter 
Lari on Facebook

What Happened Next? By Sheena Wilkinson

What happened next?

That’s what I always want to know. That's what keeps us reading, and, when a book really gets under our skin, keeps us wondering about the characters long after THE END. Did Scarlett win Rhett back? Were Christina and Mark happy? How did Darrell and Sally get on at St Andrew's? I've only just realised that Kitty Barne wrote a sequel to one of my favourite childhood books, She Shall Have Music, and I can't wait to read it. 

Sometimes on school visits, readers ask me what happened next to some of my own characters. Often I don’t know, though I always have a fair idea. When I judged a writing competition in County Clare this spring, based around my historical novel Name Upon Name, I got to see what other people imagined happened next to those characters. Which was Very Odd. (In a good way.)

When the 13^th started to loom this month, I wondered, as I always do, what to focus on here. There are plenty of debates going on around children’s books, libraries, YA fiction, Europe… Things I care deeply about but don’t much feel like writing about here. ABBA is the only place online where I tend to get a bit more personal. Some would say self-indulgent. So I decided to write a sequel. Two, in fact.

In March this year I blogged about what it feels like when your writing career seems to have stalled. 
http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/marching-on-without-my-shimmy.html  When the rejections are flying in so fast that you’re still reeling from one before the next one hits you. When you start to fear that your last book was your Last Book. I hated every second of writing that post; I very nearly didn't post it. It felt so -- naked. 

But I’m glad I wrote it, because – as so often with ABBA – it clearly struck a chord with other writers, and I’m looking forward, at the upcoming Charney retreat in July, to sharing some insights about how to keep going in those disheartening circumstances, and to learning from others. 

The sequel to that post? Well, I’m about to sign not one but two contracts. My last book was not my Last Book.  I can’t say more than that just yet, but oh! the relief!

Last month I blogged about my plum tree, the sad fate thereof. http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/a-glut-of-plums.html

And the sequel to that?

Rainbow Beauty - The Story of A Trilogy. By Kelly McKain

I’m really excited that the second book in my Rainbow Beauty trilogy, Strawberry Summer, is out today. 

Holding the lovely chunky finished book in my hands has got me thinking about when it was just an idea on a scrap of paper, and about the long journey that little first thought has taken.

It’s a journey that’s almost finished, as I’m just about to check over the copy-edited third book, Blueberry Wishes, so I’m just a hop, skip and some fun quiz and recipe-type endlims away from finishing the whole of Abbie’s story. 

Just to fill you in, when they find themselves penniless and about to be made homeless, Abbie, her mum and sisters start a new life in a grotty flat in a strange town, still reeling with shock. 

But then Abbie makes some lovely new friends (including the official Most Gorgeous Boy In The World) and comes up with the idea to start a beauty parlour in the empty shop below their flat. The book is full of family and friends’ drama, loads of business know-how, and a big helping of romance, too. 

Rainbow Beauty, the beauty parlour, and what you’d imagine was the core idea of the book, was something that came out of my mouth while chatting to my editor on the phone. Before I knew it I found myself going on about the family starting a business and Abbie making all the fresh, natural products right from scratch. As she asked for more detail, I waxed lyrical about Rainbow Beauty being a place to dream and scheme about the future, and heal their hearts.

I’m not sure where that all came from  - probably all embedded in my subconscious after all  the happy hours I’ve spent in Lush and The Body Shop, and in front of The Apprentice – but I couldn’t wait to get started.

             

So then came lots of planning. Here are a few of the resources I used.   

There were a lot of sample products, too, but when I came to take the pic I found I’d used them all! 

The lovely male ballet dancers who work in Lush Covent Garden helped me with my research, spending ages talking me through the products and demonstrating them on me (which was extra-nice as I was extremely pregnant at the time and appreciated a bit of pampering!). 

 I had to cost out everything for the business, find out about permits and cosmetic testing, and best of all, invent all the Rainbow Beauty products. 

I also had to gather loads of information about the town I was setting the books in, Totnes, including how long it takes to walk between each location, which supermarkets were within reach and all about the surrounding area. By the time I was calling the nearest college that offered beauty courses to find out in detail what they covered (Abbie’s sister Saff enrols) I realised I should probably stop the research and, you know, get on with making up the characters and what they do and stuff. 

Luckily for me, between all the ideas that had emerged from the research and all the scribbled notes I’d amassed from bits and pieces of thinking time (during ironing, train journeys and dog-walking, mainly, in my case) I appeared to have that pretty much covered. 

So then I wrote up my notes and make them into scene plans (I write in scenes rather than chapters) and worked those up. I got all my resources up on the wall in front of my desk, so there would be no excuse to wander off in search of a missing piece of information when I got writing.

 Then I stopped for a bit. Three months to be precise. Just for a rest before writing the book. Oh, and to have baby Freddie and get him to sleep enough at nights so that I could function (I was so tired I remember wailing to my husband, ‘I’ve just put my toothbrush in the fridge, how am I supposed to write a novel??’). 

But somehow that bit of my brain still seemed to be working so with the help of Messrs’ Twining and Cadbury I cracked on and wrote Peppermint Kiss in three months. Then came the other two books. For those I had the luxury of a little more sleep and time, though still with enough of a panic at deadline time to make me feel like I have a proper job with ‘targets’ and ‘stress’. 

 And now Freddie is two and a half, and the second book is out, and the third is about to go to the printers (and the e-bookers). I’m looking at my (OK, OK, slightly stalker-ish) Rainbow Beauty wall and realising it will soon be time to take it all down. But to be replaced with what? 

I’m not feeling the call of the next idea yet. I’m sure I will, but for now, I’m in the middle of a busy year getting round to schools and festivals to talk about the series (all three books are out this year). I really enjoy that so much – especially when they crack out the cakes, as here at St Eddie’s in Liverpool.

When I even so much as think about writing another three long novels back to back, it feels like my brain might actually explode. But I know it will happen, or a stand-alone, or a series. I know the next idea will come calling, and I’ll stockpile the Dairy Milk and build up another whole world from a scribble on the back of an envelope. I love finding that first spark, and writing and editing, and especially meeting readers and signing their books. 

I love the whole journey, and as this one isn’t over yet, I’m going to enjoy every minute I have left of it. And I wish all of you happy reading and writing too!