Story Behind The Story: The Girl Who Died Backwards Part 2

Alright, so here we are again with Part 2.

Just as a reminder, this post WILL spoil The Girl Who Died Backwards... so only read after you've read the book!

I focused mostly on the story last time, so this time I'm going to focus on two characters that emerged as I wrote the book. One of them is the mysterious Lord Ashmore. I knew I wanted a main villain for the book who would continually plague Grace & Witherbloom by seeding these anachronistic devices around the world. This was to be the main thrust of the series of stories, in fact.

When I write, I can't really plan too much out. I have an idea of where I want the story to head, the basic plot and a solid grasp of the characters. I do a lot of writing in my head before I ever get anything typed in. But I can't get too specific or fill too much out or I fear getting bored with the story and abandoning it. I feel a little bit less like that now, having been through this process. But that's how I felt back in 2008 as I started writing The Girl Who Died Backwards. So, Ashmore was just a vague notion of a character. In fact, in the original draft of the book you only heard about him. We never actually got to see him "in person" as we did in the final book. I added the coda with Ashmore years later after I'd finished book three and decided I really liked with "ending" with him in the early books. I'm happy with the final scene. It does a lot to set up Ashmore and the entire series (including the finale!) in ways that aren't immediately obvious.

Of course, even at this point I didn't know much more about Ashmore other than I planned him to be handsome, charming and very mysterious. But that's all I needed to know.

Whereas Ashmore had been planned from the start of the book, just sketched in very roughly, Wilhelmina was a very late edition. I had written the opening of the story, set in the shadow of The Great Exhibition. I have always had a fascination with the Crystal Palace, The Great Exhibition and World Fairs. The whole concept, the artwork depicting them and the posters have always intrigued me. I really liked the start of the book. I think it's a great introduction to the characters, and I like how they just sort of breeze into the scene and start causing trouble from the start. I realized I needed a maid character to let G&W interupt Bradford's presentation. So I had an older maid named Francine do it. Francine opened up the door, and promptly went away.

I had gotten a little past the point where Helen is refilling Josiah's water reserves when I began to think about maids. Gray haired Francine was a nice stock character to pull out to open a door. But I thought she was a little boring. And I didn't want the start of my story to be boring, even if it was just the character who opened the door. So I started to think of other maid characters I had liked, and I remembered Gwyneth from the Doctor Who episode "The Unquiet Dead." I instantly liked Gwyneth (as many did, and it's down to Eve Myles's winning performance as much as anything) and I decided I wanted to steal her basic plucky character to open my door for me. Her name would be Wilhelmina. And she would open the door and go away as Francine had done. But she'd be a bit mousy. And she'd have a bit of business where she'd save Bradford's machine from being destroyed. But she would go away.

Then something odd happened. Wilhelmina would not go away. I started to think about the fact that I had jettisoned Kathy from the story after the web comic fell through and how I no longer had anyone to ask dumb questions. Josiah doesn't know everything Helen does, but he knows a lot. If it was just the two of them alone, you couldn't get a lot of those questions that arise for the readers answered without some unnecessary extra work. It's not that I minded doing a little extra work, it's just that I don't like exposition to "show" too much and I like it to be delivered on the fly and as economically as possible. So having an audience identification figure that could be introduced to the world of G&W and ask the questions we might ask just made sense.

And then... well, then I had an idea for Wilhelmina that made it absolutely imperative that she was there. Suddenly, she wasn't just an interesting addition to the book. She was essential to it. Sometimes you're writing and things just sort of happen and you think "Oh yes... oh yes this is it! This is how it was meant to be all along!" Wilhelmina's creation was such a moment. But we'll talk about that more once we get to the final book, shall we?

So, I finished the first book. I read it over and over. I gave it to a couple friends to read over. The first section was done, and I quite liked it. I'd go back and tweak this or that, but for the most part the book was published much as it was first written. The notable exceptions were the addition of the scene with Ashmore, and the way I handled labeling the time jumps. I was really afraid of the time jumps being confusing, so I went through several concepts before settling on labeling each new time jump as "Day 1" or "Day 5." Hopefully those ended up being helpful. Now, it was time to write the second story.

I had the story all figured out. It would be adventurous, and take G&W from the foggy streets of London to far off Tibet! It would see an old genre mainstay reinvented in a (hopefully) novel way. And it almost caused me to abandon the entire project...

Story Behind The Story: The Girl Who Died Backwards Part 1

Well, it's been far too long without an update. There are several reasons for this, but I must admit one of them begins with "Sky" and ends with "rim." I'm not a huge gamer, to be honest, but my life has been sucked away recently by a couple of great games. The other reason though was that I wanted to give a little more time between the release of the last story and before I started this series of blog posts.

I've already went through the origin of Grace & Witherbloom in general. Those were spoiler free. These, however, will not be. So please do not read this unless you've read The Girl Who Died Backwards. If you haven't, click the title, download it and then come back here later. :)

Seriously. Spoilers Ahoy!


The Girl Who Died Backwards

As I detailed in the blogs about the origins of G&W, I had decided to turn the planned web comic into a series of novellas. After some reflection, I thought the concept would be more successful this way. Having completed it now, I can definitely say this is true. Certainly from a creative standpoint. I had made some drastic changes from the web comic already, including making Helen a young girl, doing away with the character of Kathy, and setting the story in Victorian England versus the present day.

I knew that I wanted the series of novellas to function a bit like episodes in the season of a TV series. I wanted little threads to pop up in each story that tied them together and ultimately culminated in the final story. Basically, I wanted the stories to be more connected than just a series of random adventures with the same characters. So I hit upon the idea very early of having these anachronistic devices seeded by the "villain" character that G&W had to shut down. But I wasn't sure what I wanted those adventures to be. I had some ideas swirling around in my head that had been there for a long time. One of these was the plot that was going to be the first story of the web comic. But I didn't want that to be my first novella. For one thing, there were some difficulties present in the idea for the story. I felt like it would require more explanation that would be desirable in an introductory story just for people to understand the main plot. This isn't great for a first story as you also have to introduce the main characters. I was able to work through these difficulties, however, as the basic concept for the web comic story became Book 3, The Village That Sleeps. Of course, there is some irony that this was one of my worries about using this plot, as it could certainly be argued the mechanics of The Girl Who Died Backward are not that much easier to explain! But we'll get to that in a moment...

So, I needed a plot! A month or so before I decided to write the novella, I had been kicking around the idea of pitching to Big Finish to write one of their Doctor Who audio adventures. For those who have not heard of Big Finish, they are a fantastic company who produces these amazing audio plays complete with a full cast, dramatic music and sound effects. They really are so well produced and I'm a huge fan. Sadly, after just a day or so of thinking up ideas for adventures that would work well on audio, I found out that BF do not accept unsolicited submissions. However, one idea that I had for a Doctor Who audio adventure was called "Retro." I had only just sketched the concept out a bit in my mind, but it involved the Doctor having to work through a story's events in reverse. It's one of those things that I was surprised hadn't been done before with Doctor Who as I thought it was a novel way to play with time travel as a device.

So I decided to use this basic concept for G&W. In fact, the story was called "Retro" for a while until I decided that the title didn't really fit the feel of the series. The idea of it being a sort of "mystery" that G&W had to solve appealed to me as well. Every mystery, in essence, is a time travel story. It just a thought process. You find clues and have to mentally work through events to reconstruct them. So the psychochronal projector is a sort of literal extension of that idea. I had always intended to put a twist on the mystery though. There is no clear "killer" in the end. Just a procedure that went horribly wrong. The crime was really more in the cover up than the actual death. Some readers have found the ending a bit perplexing. I must admit, I liked the idea of not having it be too clear. In fact, in an original draft it was even MORE obscure. I never say the word "abortion," for a start. Not that I was avoiding the word, just that it felt odd to spell out in the context of the story and the time period it was taking place in. I had actually done quite a bit of research into how abortion was practiced at that time and the public perception of it, which led me to treating it a bit obscurely. To make matters worse, in the original version I left it something of a question as to whether Mary had died because of the botched procedure or whether she had taken her own life over being depressed when she thought Helen had learned her secret. This was a mistake and made it too muddy. So I did make it as clear as I could (without over-explaining) that Mary had likely died because of an abortion gone awry. At this point, hopefully readers will realize the title of the story was a play on words.

I was a bit nervous about the whole abortion angle, though, I must admit. The series was generally meant to be a fun (though not juvenile) adventure series. I sort of liked how that touch of realism crashed into the fantasy world of G&W, though. And it certainly wasn't something I'd ever read about before in that sort of context. It's easy to romanticize the past, and certainly Victorian England is romanticized, for the most part! I mean, if you think about it, even the seedier sides of Victoriana are pretty much embraced and romanticized these days. So having a little of why living back then wasn't great creep in seemed effective to me. But abortion is a touchy subject, to say the least. I didn't want people to feel like I'd used it as a gimmick, and I hope I've treated it thoughtfully here.

I'll continue on with story behind the story of The Girl Who Died Backwards next time, where I'll focus on the development of the villain of the series, and how needing someone to open a door led to the creation of one of the most important characters in the series...