I began prep work on what MIGHT become my next series (meaning my next series AFTER the fantasy book and 4 book series that I’ve talked about on this blog before). As I said recently, I’ve been playing around with the basic idea for a few years, trying to find my way into the story. It began to come together more concretely over the past few weeks, and news ideas have been clicking into place in recent days. It’s still at a very early stage, with lots of blanks to fill in, but today I wrote up a very rough outline of what I want to do in the first 3 books, along with a full plot outline for the first book, which hopefully I’ll start writing tomorrow. If all goes according to plan, the books will be a bit shorter than my previous books (probably even shorter than any of The Saga books), but will hopefully be released at a faster pace than The Demonata -- my aim is to write short, punchy books, many of which will end on cliffhangers, and each of which will run into the next -- i.e. it would be like the Vampire Mountain trilogy, in that it’s one big story split up into parts, only this story would be split into quite a lot of parts!!! I’ve no idea how many books there might be in this series, or even how to develop the contral conflict at the heart of the storyline (although I have a vague sense of what that conflict will be). But, if all goes smoothly with the writing, I guess I’ll find out over the coming months and years ...

I’m both excited and nervous about this new series. Excited because it’s good to be back in the saddle after almost a year of not writing anything new -- because of the way I work, I spent most of the last year editing several books (the last half of The Demonata, my three D B Shan books, the fantasy book, the 4 book series), and when you add in my tour dates, there hasn’t been much time for anything new. I get itchy when there’s a long gap between new books. First drafts are the lifeblood of any writer, and I’m always looking ahead to what comes next. Editing is more fun that writing a first draft (at least for me), but without a first draft, I have nothing to edit!! It’s exciting to be launching myself into something new again, to start out afresh and see where the story takes me.

But I’m also nervous because this is the first time I’ve ever consciously set out to write a multi-book series. The Saga and The Demonata grew organically -- I got sucked into them. I was working onbook 3 of The Saga before I got a sense of the scale of the project, and I was five books intoThe Demonata before I figured out the main story!!!! This is the first time I’ve tried to plot out a series in advance. It’s not that I made a decision to write another series -- I never work that way -- I just knew, from the moment the idea first struck me, that this needed several books to work the way I felt it could. That’s the main reason why I didn’t start work on it earlier. I could probably have developed and written a first draft of book 1 during the past year, but I knew this wasn’t a book I could write and stop at. That is, Cirque Du Freak and Lord Loss were both conceived as one-off books. I knew with CDF that there would be a potential to write more vampire books, but I also knew that if I didn’t, the book could stand by itself. That’s not the case here -- the first book of this series would have been nothing without more to follow it and take the story forward. I didn’t want to start it until I had a better idea of what came next.

A developing story is a bit like a developing photo. You can see a bit or two clearly to begin with. Then you get a very vague sense of everything around those bits. And then, as you focus in, the whole starts to reveal itself to you. The difference is, with a photo you KNOW the image will reveal itself. With a story, you have to work on it and plug away at it and force it to develop. For a long time, all I could see of this story was the bit or two that I’ve had in mind for the last couple of years. But now more and more is coming into focus, and the thing about writing is that once you get on a roll, the revelations start coming thick and fast. There’s still a lot about this series that’s a mystery to me, but now that I’ve cracked the first few books, I’m more confident that the rest will reveal itself too. In time ...