Emotional Colour

Finish it.

I did write a book of fiction. It is out there and it has been read by so many people. 'What about the next one?' Many ask. 'When can we read it?'

Isn't that a wonderful question to have as a writer!

Writing book one took all of me, at least everything I was to the point I finished it, which was 2010. I came up with the idea for book two about a year before that, in 2009. My time from 2010 to 2012 was largely spent getting book one polished and published. All the while book two brewed and bubbled in my mind, busily evolving the bones of a story from the stew of imagination. In 2012 I started writing it. It is there, the bones, but in writing this second book I have learned a lot, not just of what it takes to craft the lives and dramas of whole new characters, but in the kind of writer I am.

From the moment I started writing properly in 2002, it has been a release valve. Reflected in the words are all my frustrations, hopes, dreads, loves and murderous rages. Most of all writing is a means for my emotions to be gently let out. Emotion for me, I have learned, is everything. I'm telling you now like I've always known this, the reality is it took a hard year of struggling. It has been a year of plotting and progressing slowly, driven now by the need for a second book to create a broader commercial canvas. Some of the writing has glowed but so much has been dry - words and actions strung around momentum in the name of a story.

Finishing book one really had taken all of me. Everything had been expelled in creating Sarah Sawacki's story, the emotions of my imagination given colour by the books, images, video and music, were all now part of that book. Very little remained inside of me.

Fortunately this is a restless mind. I have realised the struggling isn't so much that I haven't got another book in me, it's that I'm busy creating a whole load of new imagination to pour into book two. The research has been as much discovering the content and colour of the emotions as it has the technical detail. This is after-all a learning process, I'm coming to understand it always will be.

Book two is about a man who makes a living protecting people, coming to terms with the murder of his wife. It is about him discovering why. It is now busily being animated, the dry words given emotional colour. It is being written because I care for the story, it is being crafted for a commercial audience to share and enjoy, not just so I can expand my canvass of work. Book three will be the next stage in Sarah Sawacki's story. I'm very keen to find out how much of what went into her first story will be there for me again. We will see.

Being Unfaithful (To Fictional Characters)

There is a little known saying, that goes like: 'Nothing sells a good book like a second good book, and nothing makes money like three good books.' A saying that Steig Larsson would probably whole heartedly agree with, if his heart had not so inconveniently failed him as his books went global.

Money, force of will and smart marketing will get a book attention in the short term, but for it to be successful it needs to be good. To make money it needs siblings. Modern reading minds love series characters. If they like one book, they will typically work their way through them all. It is therefore to series characters I aim. But I do not want to be tied to one series. I do have the outline for the second Sarah Sawacki book, sat on my hard drive. I am very excited about it too. As nobody really knows about Sarah at this moment in time, what better time to start another series.

So we busily make book two. I'd say write, but the ideal of playing a computer keyboard like some concert pianist and producing four effortless brilliant pages a day, is a long way from reality. So I make, I think of it more as paper-mache using words. The idea for my second series character occurred about two thirds of the way through writing the first. So we are talking 2009. This in contrast was about a man. He would be a man that women like and men understand. A very hard man with heart, a lost soul trying to understand why the most precious thing in his life has been ripped from him.

I wrote about 30,000 words of this, just under one third, after I had written Chasing Innocence. It then sat in the digital draw for two years while I edited and polished and eventually published Chasing Innocence. During the publishing stage I started working on TMWWRWs again (it's an acronym for the books title). This started as an edit and eventually became writing the book. It was slow work because publishing your own book takes a lot of time and energy. I was getting in about 4-6 hours a week. Now Chasing Innocence is out there and much of what I can do is out of my hands, I have about 4 hours a day to write. Hoorah.

Except something is different. It feels odd. I'm very excited about Marcus Hangiman and his journey, and during the hiatus came up with a whole bunch of very good ideas. I'm as excited as I was starting Sarah's journey, and a little more comfortable because I know a little more of what I should be doing. But somehow, having had Sarah Sawacki in my life for four years now, it feels like I am being unfaithful to her, by writing about somone else. It is a very weird feeling. Even when I was writing TMWWRWs the first time, Sarah and how I could progress her story was always in the back of my mind. But now it's all over for a while, it's a bit like selfishly going off with someone else knowing this character will be waiting when I'm done. It is a feeling similar to the one that makes you finish a book, which is the very strong allegiance you have to your characters. You want to finish the story for them. I suspect that is what will drive the completion of this book too. The need to tell this first part of Marcus' story, the excitement of publishing it and the thrill of saying hello to Sarah once more.