Fledglings

I once, casually mentioned to the Gruesome Twosome that they would be leaving home at eighteen. I thought no more about it, but a little while later they asked my wife if they would be eighteen soon, as they weren't ready to leave home yet.

They were three at the time.

The things we do to our children by accident. Fortunately they don't remember that particular episode and weren't scarred for life.

The Gruesomes will hopefully be leaving home next year, off to university and starting on the next stage of their adventures. It will be quite hard I think, both going away at the same time, but we've done the best we can with them and I have to say, I think that they are pretty fine people.

The tenuous connection is that, last week I published CITADEL, the final part of the story that has consumed me for the last five years. It was never meant to be a trilogy, but I got to the end of ECHO and found there was more to say.

ECHO went out in 2012 and OUTCAST in 2013. For reasons that escape me, its taken three years to release the final part. The writing finished well over a year ago but it just sat on my iPad whilst I wrote 20 chapters of something new. I think, in part, it was about not wanting to let go, not wanting it to be over. There's always the temptation to write a fourth book, but I haven't anything new to say and shoehorning another story into the format would not result in a good product.

I've loved learning about Echo and York and writing about their adventures but, just like my children l there comes a time when you have to let them fly away.

Plus (spoiler), not everybody made it home.

The difficult second album

Echo had a couple of themes ; the conflict between duty and desire, and the need of an outsider to belong. Although the characters kept going off and doing their own thing, I always had a framework that I could come back to, just by asking "What is this book about?"

You often hear bands talking about the difficult second album. They've got shed loads of songs left over from the first album, but they want the next to be recognisable, but to have progressed. Echo was intended to be a stand alone novel but, somewhere along the way it turned into a trilogy. I had a story line, focussing on the search for the lost Visionary Ship, the Clarke, but no real idea what the book was actually about.

That's not the only problem with a second book. Starting out involves introducing the characters and getting to know them. The third book will bring everything together with some big battle scene and a final resolution (and we -I include myself in that - will find out what happened and who survived). But the second book risks being just the journey from the start to the end. 

I suspect this is not unique. Look at Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy. I think LOTR is a fantastic story, well written, which is one of the few books that I have read which induced a real sense of dread and uncertainty over the outcome. But the middle bit? Oh, get on with it!

I've just completed chapter 14 of Clarke and it's been a bit of a slog. Partly it's that Echo has been so well received that expectations are high and there's a lot of pressure to make it as good, which I'm not sure I'm doing. But also, I've not been sure what the book is about, other than the bit between the start and the end. There have been fun bits. Woz won a competition and got a cameo which I've just done and she's quite pleased with. And I'm in the middle of a big fight and Echo has just rammed her knife into somebody's thigh, severing their femoral artery and getting covered in blood for her trouble.

But today I figured out my theme. It's going to involve a rewrite of several early chapters but, perhaps the difficult second novel isn't going to be so difficult now I know what the book is actually about.