When I finished the third draft of my first novel in December (the first draft to be completed with the story as it is) I wanted to start immediately with the sequel, and I took steps to do so. I worked out which of my characters were still alive and able to be active, what I wanted to happen, created all the folders on my hard drive...
And then I didn't get anywhere. I use the free software yWriter 6 for my writing, though at the time I used the previous version, and it allows me to easily visualise just how much I've got written. And therein lay my problem. I started with an idea in February 2013 and wrote loads of quite terrible stuff before I actually started to consider where my story might go. There was a lot of salvageable material there which I used. And with every subsequent revision, I've effectively copied the previous version of a given scene, improving it wherever it needs improving, changing details wherever details need changing, and adding new chapters as necessary. But though I was still doing new stuff, the project was never empty, it was always fairly full.
This time, the project was completely empty. For the first time in nearly three years, I was looking at a blank document with nothing to copy into place. And that made it impossible for me to build up the momentum to just finish that one chapter. The first thing I wrote was the opening chapter of my newest POV character, Armand Heramey - who appears briefly in the first book but is only now getting a meaty story. I began his first chapter on December 2nd 2015. And I finished it yesterday. It didn't help that it was a particularly tricksy chapter, as all the characters and locations are either completely new or very sparsely filled in - almost all of the supporting cast were created for this chapter, and I have no idea what their personalities are like.
But the fact is, I dried up, and I couldn't get that chapter finished, couldn't get a storyline organised in any detail to allow me to write.
That was until about a week from the end of February 2016. I was looking through the second draft of the first book, when I realised I'd actually carried the story on a little bit further (the basic story of the first two books was originally going to be one, but around halfway in I realised that I was moving far too quickly, without fleshing out the characters and the world, so I decided to redo it in more depth). What I had available wasn't much, maybe three or four chapters, all of which needed a fair bit of changing to bring them up to speed with the characters' situations as they are. And it also took a bit of gymnastics to get the story to work with them in. So that was my first task.
The first chapter I copied over, and as such the first chapter I completed, was a chapter from the point of view of Jessica Edwards, one of the viewpoints from my first book, and this was written to be the opening chapter - I reintroduced all the characters formally, and did everything as though I was carrying on the action in an entirely new story.
And then I realised the issue with that. I don't want to say specifically what, but a key incident in that chapter cannot take place until a specific other event takes place, and that specific other event also needs to follow a different event. With time in between, as well. And so just like that, Chapter 1 became Chapter 10. I've still only got seven chapters written, and that's the latest of them in story order. It's also not the intended focus of this blog-post.
You see, I've been cracking on in earnest with the new storyline for Armand Heramey. Partly because of spacing, and partly because he's new, he is the POV for two of the first five chapters, according to the current plan, which means it hasn't taken me long to reach and write his second chapter, which I did today. But as I wrote, I realised my original story plan is far too fast-paced and far too bland. So while I was writing, I was half-aware that I needed something else to come in the middle, so that events later on in the storyline would have a bigger impact. It means that Armand will have a story until at least the end of Book Three, but that's not an issue - if anything, it's healthy to have ideas that take me that far into the series. Though I have plans for how the series will hopefully end, the middle is a lot looser on detail. Several characters don't have anything to do at the moment between early book two and the end of the series.
But though I knew I needed Armand's story to have something else, I wasn't sure what. At the same time, I was working on fleshing out the world. I knew early on that I wanted to bring in a few of the commissioners, who are authority figures on a galactic scale but who I never really got to show in the first book (one of them is in a single chapter, for a tiny part).
So, as I was writing Chapter 2, I needed to end a conversation between two characters with an interruption. And I knew I wanted to bring one of the newly created commissioner characters into play. The logical choice here is to have one of the newly created commissioners interrupt the conversation, and that's the choice I went for. And then I found myself wondering, "why? Why would she interrupt the conversation?" (Yes, this character is a woman. No, you're not super-observant for spotting that.)
I thought for a bit - racing against the clock as I had twenty minutes left to achieve my daily 1,000 word minimum target - and then, suddenly, the idea came to me. Not only does it flesh out some of my characters, and give Armand's first storyline more depth, it actually tees in quite conveniently to later events which I've known for a while I wanted to include, but which I had no idea how to bring into play.
This, combined with the fact that several VERY important events, all part of the plan for at least twelve months or so, end up happening at the same time - part of a very long series of heavily interconnected chapters whose brief plans I typed up at perhaps my fastest speed ever, doing so uninterrupted for a solid half-hour in case I lost my train of thought and forgot how they all linked - means that I'm very excited to carry on writing the second book (provisionally titled On Virgin Moors).
And now I've written more than 10,000 words. Which means I no longer have to look at an empty project, at least until the time comes to repeat this whole process with Book Three. I think I'll intentionally write further into the story than Book Two requires, just so I've got some fuel to kickstart the third one when it gets to that time again.
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