Story Behind The Story: The Forgotten Fair

Ah, and here we are. The final SBTS for the final book in the series of adventures of Grace & Witherbloom. As with all of these, if you haven't read The Forgotten Fair, not a lot of this is going to make sense and it's going to be very spoiler-filled. So beware!

Plenty of time to turn back (or go to Amazon and get The Forgotten Fair!)...

All right, for those of you who are left, it's time to talk about the final adventure in the series. This one was an odd one for me. You see, I had in my mind a general idea about what I wanted to happen in the final adventure. For one thing, I'd written the premonition (or vision of the future via Bradford's psychochronal projector) that Wilhelmina had years before, as part of writing The Girl Who Died Backwards. So I knew that had to happen.

I also knew I wanted a walloping great big machine for the finale. Maybe that's cliche, but it also just felt right. After all of Ashmore's devices, I wanted the final device to be his most ambitious and daring. In the years between writing the first book and the last book, a thought had begun to form in my mind that the final book should take place during a World's Fair. I liked the symmetry of it. The first book would take place during the Great Exhibition and the final book would take place at a World's Fair. Now, the next event of that type would have been the Exposition Universelle in Paris, France in 1855. Now, a good amount of time passes between the first book and the last book, but not that much time. I could have extended the time that Helen was lost in the Emperor's universe, but I didn't want to stretch that too far, to be honest. Plus, I have to admit... I wanted the finale to take place in New York. In the new world. It just felt right for Ashmore to make that sort of dramatic gesture.

But, the World's Fair didn't take place in New York until 1939. But, that's easy to remedy, really, when you have a time-changing anachroanarchist like Ashmore around, right? Oh, and you know anachroanarchist? That was a term I had thought about refering to Ashmore as in the book. It doesn't exactly slip off the tongue, does it though? I think it's best I didn't go through with that. :) Alternate titles for the series at one point, by the way included "The Anachronica" or "The Anachroanarchist Devices" all of which would have been a bit silly and wordy. But, maybe there's some alternate universe out there where these books are called that.

But, I digress. I knew that I wanted Ashmore to go to New York. I knew I wanted a World's Fair to be taking place. And, it seemed natural that the big device be at the center of the fair. Everything began to take shape, and with it so did Ashmore's grand plan. Now, I just had to get them there.

Originally, Helen was going to tell Josiah her "origin" on the ship ride over to America. It was actually a real problem figuring out where to put her story, actually. Once I thought of the opening with Josiah disguising his identity and confronting Ashmore face to face, I knew that's how the story had to open. And I didn't think opening the story with a bit of exposition from Helen would work. Originally, her origin would have been a separate short story (like Josiah's was planned to be, originally) that would have been bundled with "The Other Key." But, I didn't really think Helen's story could stand on it's own as a complete tale, to be honest. Not for lack of interest in what is going on, but just that it didn't have enough meat to it. I could have gone in and filled in a lot of detail there and made it more of a separate story... but I liked the idea of not filling in too many of the details. And I also didn't want to kill any of the momentum of the story by going into the sidebar of back story for Helen.

I also had the issue that I wanted Ashmore to tell Allisa about who he was, too. So, essentially, Ashmore and Helen had the same thing to tell two different people. I really liked the idea of interspersing their stories together, and originally there was MUCH more back and forth between Helen telling Josiah her story and Ashmore telling Alissa his story. But it just became too much of a confusing jumble. And I think it robbed both moments of their power. I'm really happy with the way it turned out. It avoided being repetitive, and it gave both groups a quiet moment before the finale.

Of course, at this point we begin to really see who Ashmore is. There have been hints along the way that he isn't quite the villain we thought at first. And here we see the true measure of who he is. Arrogant, yes. But not unkind. Just very, very reckless. Which leads us to the major twist in the story. Hopefully, if people have been reading carefully this shouldn't be a complete surprise, or at least it hopefully doesn't come out of left field. Hints were certainly dropped, and Wilhelmina's actions will actually make more sense in previous books. It's no fun to explain a book, so I won't. But if you look back at how easily Wilhelmina (seemed) to adjust to G&W's life, you might find that suspicious now. And Wilhelmina being upset when Helen returned wasn't jealousy, really. She really thought she'd escaped her fate and her mission, which she didn't really want to do any more... and Helen's return changed all that. I really liked Wilhelmina. My friend Laura, who was a beta reader for me, hated her. And I can see that. She's the sort of character in a book that you can come to hate. She starts off so awkward and she's not a good adventurer and she's getting in-between the main duo. But I hope that a lot of readers liked her and felt as betrayed by her actions as G&W did. That was hard to write, her ending. Which, to me, meant it was the right thing.

And I hope people didn't find it TOO cut and dried. Because, in the end, putting aside Wilhelmina's religious motivations, she might have a point. Should anyone wield as much power over events as Helen, Josiah and Ashmore now do? I think it's a valid question, and one I hope the reader thinks about.

I'm not going to say a great deal about the end, because I'd like for it to stand on it's own, for the most part. All in all, I'm really proud of these books. Even months later after the final book was published, I remain happy that they were (hopefully) fun adventure books that also explored some important (to me) themes, if more in the background. The final moments of the book, and the final choices that the characters make are really important to me, not just in the book but in real life as well. It's always so hard to know, when you're writing something, how others will perceive your work. That's why I like to read the reviews people write about them. There are times I'm a bit perplexed by what people have said, but it's always interesting. And I'm so happy that thousands of people have given the book a chance. I hope we can pick up some more, too.

One of the main themes of the book is the concept of time as a spiral. When the thought came to me (independent of the book) all those years ago, I really loved the idea. I doubt it's very scientific. But, the spiral is everywhere in our universe. And there was something so romantically appealing about even the end of everything not really being the end. I'd heard of the theory that the beginning and end of the universe might be the same moment. But a loop sounded so boring. But a spiral, where even time itself can evolve, where the sequence of our lives can grow, and possibly even get better... well, it appealed to me, anyway.

So, is this the end? Perhaps. Or maybe it's the beginning.

Story Behind The Story: The Other Key

It's that time again. The spoilerific behind the scenes of the next novella in the series of novellas that recount the adventures of Helen Grace and Josiah Witherbloom.

As always, if you've not read the book, you really should. It costs less than a bottle of pop from a machine and it'll last longer.

So, let's head into spoiler territory...

At the climax of the last book, Helen had been spirited away by the Obsidian Emperor into his parallel world. Then, we jumped forward about a year and a half into the future to find Josiah and Wilhelmina searching for a way to get her back, all the while continuing to combat Lord Ashmore's machinations.

First of all, let's address the title. For anyone who read the last book, they knew that there was another key out there to the dimensional gateway to the Emperor's dimension. The original one, in fact. The one that was not to be discovered for another three hundred years. So titling this one "The Other Key" seems a bit like a spoiler. I actually went back and forth on whether to call it that or not. But I really liked the title, and it felt appropriate. And, let's be honest, did anyone think that Helen wouldn't return? As readers, we suspend our disbelief and go along with a story, if it's written well enough. But in the back of our minds certain truths seem very evident. Even though I'd gone through the motions of saying Helen was gone and Josiah and Wilhelmina were now the main characters, it did seem clear to me that most would be expecting Helen's return. So I liked that the title sort of teased that. Because the story really isn't about that.

Sure, it's the plot. But Wilhelmina finds the key pretty early one, really only after just enough time to introduce what her life with Josiah is like now. The Other Key is what gets Josiah and Wilhelmina back to the Emperor's dimension, true, and kicks off the adventure there. But it represents something much more powerful to Wilhelmina as a character and the book as a whole. This is very much a turning point for Wilhelmina. It's the moment when she makes a terrible choice. A choice which the reader really only understands in the next book, and I'll discuss that more in installment for the final book. I do wonder if people are a bit confused, here. Wilhelmina seems almost overly dramatic and almost hard to comprehend, I think, until you read the next book. She just seems jealous and resentful of Helen, and appears to make some rather huge leaps in logic about what her reappearance means. But, hopefully this is seen in a new light in the next book. That's all I'll say for now.

Speaking of Wilhelmina, it's my hope that people like her by this book. If they weren't on board before, I hope they are now. I really liked her. Here we see her mature from the wary maid (seemingly) dragged along by events into the full-fledged adventurer we saw hints of throughout the other books. I really enjoyed her and Josiah's relationship. It's actually slightly weird, especially for the time period. It's all a bit untoward, actually, and I didn't want to shy away from that. I mean, we know that their feelings are genuine, but the outside world doesn't, and certainly doesn't judge them well.

I had a lot of fun with the alternate world. If anything, I wish we could have spent more time there. I had thought to expand it a great deal and introduce more characters and subplots, but they just felt superfluous to the main events. But that world exists in a very visual way in my mind, and I hope I was able to communicate that to the reader so that it lives within their mind as well.

Of course, the other strand running through this story is that we finally catch up to Lord Ashmore and his friends. Ashmore has created for himself a little group that mirrors Helen, Josiah and Wilhelmina in some ways, but they are very different people. While our main characters are very upstanding citizens, Ashmore, Allisa and Jean are all outcasts, thrown together by mere chance, really. You get a tiny hint into what Ashmore has planned, and I hope that threw the readers off a bit when they realize his goal really isn't world domination or anything so prosaic.

We also get to know Baker a little better, after him appearing in very small ways and mentions in previous stories. I enjoyed the short scenes he and Reggie had together. I think they played well off each other, until poor Reggie was done away with.

I really like the ending, where everything seems as though it's gone back to the status quo. But it really hasn't. There are hints around the edges of Helen's character, I hope. She has been changed by her experiences. She's a tiny bit softer. Wilhelmina changes too, in ways that probably don't make sense until the next book. I actually felt really bad for her in that scene at the end. She's putting a whole life away, really, with her adventuring clothes. And when she puts that maid uniform back on, she's giving herself over to destiny. A destiny she knows won't end well for her. To be in that place, to feel like you have no choice... well, it's a terrible thing. A feeling I wouldn't wish on anyone.

Story Behind The Story: The Obsidian Emperor

Here it is! The spoiler-filled review of Grace & Witherbloom Book 5: The Obsidian Emperor!

So fair warning! If you've not read The Obsidian Emperor, then run over to Amazon, Amazon UK or Amazon DE and pick it up. Read it. And then come back here once you're done. I'll wait.

Okay?

Then let's go, because this (and the next book) are quite possibly my favorites of the bunch. Maybe. Actually, as a unit I was very happy with the final three books. Which is good because I suppose you don't want the story to go all boring and wibbly at the end, do you? And, in essence, though each book is pretty much a standalone story (more on that in a bit) it really is one bigger story, too. Part of the reason I liked writing the book as a series of stories was really so that I'd ensure there was no flagging middle. There are lots of starts, middles and ends. But running through them are all the threads that come to a head before resolving themselves in the final book.

But, onto the book itself. The weird thing about this book was that, unlike the first few books, I really had no idea where to take the story as I was writing Book 4. Usually my mind was working forward a couple books at least while I was writing the current book. But not this time. I had a lot of ideas floating around in my head, of course, but most of those were either used in the first four books or were rejected for any number of reasons.

I knew I wanted two more stories before the final story, which had started to take shape in my mind pretty clearly after the first seeds of it started sprouting in my mind while writing the first book, The Girl Who Died Backwards. I suppose I could have gone right into the final book, but the overall story would have felt too short. I feel like we needed more time with Josiah and Helen and Wilhelmina. I wanted them to "simmer," I suppose, and originally I wanted some space between Josiah and Helen's "origin" stories. As I believe I mentioned last time,  "Josiah's Story" (which became The Light On The Moor) was going to be a short story attached to this book, and "Helen's Story" would have been attached to the next book.

Around the time I was writing The Light On The Moor, I visited a museum with my partner. I love museums. This one wasn't huge, but it had some interesting pieces. And that got my mind going about setting an adventure in a museum. Oh, it's been done before, let's not pretend it hasn't. And I wanted one of the displays to come to life and start killing people. Which has also been done before. But I just loved the creepiness of that. It felt very much like a classic scary movie in that way, and seemed to fit Grace & Witherbloom as a series. But it needed a twist. It couldn't be a boring old mummy. It needed something to move it beyond what could be a boring retread of scary museum stories.

The title "The Obsidian Emperor" just sort of came to me, as well as the title villain. Which is probably the most boring thing to say because it doesn't give you any insight into how it happened, but there it is. I've always been fascinated by Chinese jade sculptures since I was young, and when I was a kid I had a hunk of "obsidian" that I used to look at constantly. I used to hold it up to the light and run my hands over it. It was such an intriguing hunk of glass. I'm not entirely sure if it was real obsidian or not, but it certainly looked like it. I'd purchased it from a garage sale somewhere along the way. The wonderful thing about obsidian is that it's much more "evil" looking than jade. It can also be very sharp. So a visual flashed in my head of a very scary and very dangerous villain for the story. Which was a nice change of pace because there are actually very few straight-up villains in the books. It was a refreshing change to have a direct nemesis for Helen and Josiah to play off of.

I really liked the idea of two related exhibits coming together as well, and the gate and the alternate universe from which the Emperor originated again came from a visual that flashed in my head. I thought of huge, floating pagoda cities. I just loved that visual, a merging of a classic architectural style and the very futuristic. That they hovered over a bombed-out wasteland only added to their appeal. From there, everything just sort of snowballed. It was one of those story's whose various story threads came together very naturally.

I knew I wanted to give Wilhelmina a bit of a spotlight, heading off on her own to get herself into (and out of) some trouble without Josiah and Helen around. This was important because Wilhelmina couldn't stay as inexperienced as she started out for too long. I didn't want her to become a jaded adventurer right away, but she was in danger of getting annoying if she couldn't keep up with Helen and Josiah a little bit. This was also a good set-up for the next book.

Speaking of set-ups, yes... this ends on a little big of a cliffhanger. I still feel as though the two books are really fairly distinct stories. It's more that The Other Key is a sequel to this story than it is the second part of the same story. But this is the one instance where you really get maximum satisfaction and resolution by reading two stories and not just the one.

Removing Helen came fairly late in the game, actually. Originally, the story was going to end the way that The Other Key does. But I wanted to see more of the world of the flying pagodas. And I realized that I had a perfect opportunity to develop all three of the main characters in a very substantial way. Breaking up Grace & Witherbloom was the best way to do it.

But I didn't want it to feel like a cheat. I didn't want people to think "Oh, Helen's going to get out of this in two seconds where we pick up." I think, as sophisticated readers, we know that most of the time cliffhangers are resolved fairly quickly in the next story. So I added the coda with Josiah and Wilhelmina to drive the point home. Helen is gone. Over a year has passed. Life has moved on. The Emperor's actions had a real, profound effect on everyone's lives and that wouldn't be undone at the start of the next book.

Story Behind The Story: The Light On The Moor

Ah, "The Light On The Moor" - the fourth book in the Grace & Witherbloom series. It was also one of the more difficult books to get done and the one I worked on right up until it's release.

For those of you just reading for the first time, the Story Behind The Story blogs are VERY spoilerific. If you haven't read Book 4 yet, I heartily recommend you head over to Amazon.com (or .co.uk or .de) and read it first.

Now, "The Light on The Moor" was not difficult to write in the same way "The Flood Lily" was. With the latter, I actually got hung up on the story with doubts about whether the story was going anywhere or was good enough. With TLOTM, I finished it quite quickly. Maybe a little too quickly.

The story was originally called "Josiah's Story" and was always planned as a sort of origin story for Josiah. It was going to have a companion piece called "Helen's Story" that would appear after "The Other Key." These were not going to be stand alone novellas, but rather short stories that were going to be included with books 5 and 6. But, this plan fell apart fairly quickly. For one thing, Helen's story didn't feel right separated out from "The Forgotten Fair." Before I start actually writing, I do a lot of "metal writing" where I work out the story in my head. As I thought forward to the final story, I realized that I wanted Helen and Ashmore to solve the mystery of who they were in the same story and not far removed from each other. It just had more effect.

Once "Helen's Story" was gone, it felt weird to have a story called "Josiah's Story." Without it's companion, it felt out of place. It would just be a random short story placed in front of "The Obsidian Emperor." Also, the title wasn't very Grace and Witherbloom. It just didn't have the same feel and tone. Also, in a weird way the story is much more about Helen than it is Josiah though he tells the story and it is about how he came to be created.

And finally, as I read through the first version of "The Light On The Moor" it just struck me as sort of boring. There was a lot of telling and not showing. I wrote "Helen did this and then she went here and then she said this and stayed with this person..." and so on and so forth. It was almost more like an outline of a story than an actual story. So I set about on a substantial re-write. I added a lot more depth and dialogue to everything. And once I was done I realized that it was long enough to stand on it's own. It's still the shortest of all the novellas, but it felt like a fairly complete whole.

It's interesting, the ratings on Goodreads.com seem to indicate that (of the people who have rated it) this is the story of the seven that people seem to enjoy the least. I can actually identify with that. It still has a very respectable 4/5 rating which I'm happy with, of course. But I do tend to agree it's probably most the slight of the stories. At the same time, I think what it does for Helen's character is important. Helen is presented as very cold and aloof at times. That's one of the things I like about her. There is a merciless quality about her that is quite appealing to write in a character. But a character like that can't grow and change and becomes a bit boring after a while, I think. And she is, in the end, very human. So this was the first peek at her humanity.

Not to mention it set up a few important details for the final book. :)

Next up is probably my favorite book in the series. I think the series really begins to hit it's stride with book 5, even as it starts hurtling towards the end...

Story Behind The Story: The Village That Sleeps

Okay, it's time for another blog entry in the Story Behind The Story series where I give you a little background into how the individual stories in the Grace & Witherbloom series came about.

Same old warning applies - I'll be talking quite freely about The Village That Sleeps, so if you haven't read it yet... I'd suggest coming back here after you've finished.

Now, if you've not read the prototype web comic for Grace & Witherbloom, you may want to do that now as well. It's very short, and the origins of this particular story lie there.

I had quite a few story ideas for the premiere story in the web comic, but the one that appealed to me the most was the concept of the living and the dead trading places. You get VERY little sense of the larger plot from the web comic because so much time is spent setting the story up. It's a failing of the way it was written and is probably part of the reason Zuda rejected it. If the web comic had continued, you would have found out that a scientist had created a device that somehow reversed life and death. All of London (modern day London, as the web comic took place in the present day unlike the book) had fallen under this. What you see in the comic is their neighbor stumbling into Helen and Josiah's house while on a run (notice the trendy at the time iPod Shuffle he sports) and dies. We also find out a mummy Helen had kept in the basement had escaped. Thus, the living were dying and the dying were rising from the grave.

There were a few problems with this concept, some of which plagued me through to the novel. What was the machine DOING exactly? I wanted some idea in my head even if I didn't get into it in depth. I had planned to show these skeletons and half-rotten people just milling about doing their business. There would be a skeletal postman delivering mail, rotted bus drivers driving their routes and so on and so forth. I thought it would be a surreal picture. The point was that these resurrected dead didn't realize they were dead. This would be exemplified by a young female reporter who would seek out G&W for their help. She'd realize something wasn't quite right (as others of the newly undead) but couldn't quite figure it out. But how do skeletons move? All the dead couldn't come back... some were just dust, right? And if all of them came back it'd get very crowded. If all of London was affected, how would the rest of the world react?

I never really got that far in answering those questions. I was confident I could figure it out if Zuda selected the comic. But, of course, they did not.

When it came time to write the novels, the basic notion of the living and the dead coming back to life resurfaced in my head. The female reporter was the first thing that went. The book took place in Victorian times and female reporters were very rare back then and certainly wouldn't be investigative journalists. At least not at the time G&W is set. Without her, I lost the compelling and personal emotional component of the story. I also decided to move the story from London to a relatively isolated village in the Welsh countryside. This was far easier to handle in terms of scale. Also, it allowed me to play with the mystery of it a bit more before the big reveal of what exactly was going on. The idea of the undead postman returned, but he was the more more "fleshed out" (if you'll pardon the pun) character you see in the book. It was his plight that then became part of the emotional core of the book.

In many ways, the pieces of the puzzle for "The Village That Sleeps" fell into place relatively easily. The new format of the book actually solved a lot of the problems I had with the story originally. The scientist wasn't an independent madman with some undefined purpose. He was just a desperate man trying out one of Ashmore's machines. As I crafted the book I thought of the scene with the scientist and his wife. It was a fairly complex task figuring out how to give the audience a few hints as to what was really going on without making it seem to implausible. But I was really happy with the twist at the end and the emotional impact it had. Plus, I got to have a mysterious village, a spooky little girl, and roving masses of mindless undead all in one story.

On top of that, it gave Josiah some time away from Helen, which I think his character needed. It was interesting to see how he operated without Helen. There is a sense in the first couple of stories that Helen is driving everything, I think. You don't really know if Josiah is just going along with everything or has a drive of his own. I think here you see very clearly that he is very much his own man and capable of operating independently of Helen. Though I didn't know it at the time, this would become pretty critical before the end of the book.

One thing I never really did dive much into though was the "how" of what was happening. I'm really not much for technobabble, and let's face it... any explanation I would have given would have been pure technobabble nonsense. It was enough to me to address it slightly—and in a way that I hope seems relatively understandable, if not plausible—and move on. Re-reading it again, I think this was the right direction. Although it'll be a story or two before people understand the nature of the devices Ashmore creates, at least in hindsight the rather fanciful nature of some of them should make total sense.

Writing "The Village That Sleeps" was something of a breeze. The only big change was that I originally was going to have a whole subplot of Helen getting forcibly taken away and cared for by the concerned and strong-willed woman we meet right before G&W enter the town of Ddubryn. I thought it might be a fun set of scenes to see them sort of bounce off each other as Helen resisted the woman's good-natured and motherly attempts to take care of her. But, I realized these scenes really didn't have a point in the greater context of the story, and would probably feel like padding.

One note of trivia - the town of Ddubryn is entirely fictional. I named it by combining the welsh words for black (Ddu) and hill (Bryn.)

Next, up, I'll talk about Book 4, "The Light On The Moor" - which I'll just say right now was probably the hardest one to write of them all.

Story Behind The Story: The Flood Lily

Helloooo internet land.

This is the next installment in a series of blogs about the stories behind the stories. This one, in particular, is about the second book in the Grace & Witherbloom series, The Flood Lily.

Fair warning, SPOILERS WILL FOLLOW. Please don't read on until you've read the second book. It's worth it, I promise!

Now, onto the second book. As I (somewhat ominously) mentioned in my last blog, this is the story that almost caused me to abandon the book altogether. It all started off promisingly enough. As soon as I completed The Girl Who Died Backwards, I dived right into the next book. I wanted an exciting opening for the book, so I set it high up in an unspecified mountain range. Two brave explorers risked life and limb to retrieve a strange artifact. I had been writing this scene in my head for a while before I typed it out as I was finishing up The Girl Who Died Backwards. I was very happy with the way it ended up, and the introduction of Henrietta Durand. So, the action moves to the home of Grace and Witherbloom. We get a little time to catch up with them before they are bounding out on their next adventure...

And this is where I stopped. I just stopped. You see, I made a very amateur mistake. I am always thinking a bit ahead of where I'm writing. I, of course, had a basic notion of what the artifact was and what it was going to do when I started. But now that I was inching closer to revealing the "villain" of the piece, I began to question myself. You see, the story idea for this one actually came from the title. Sometimes a title that appeals to me will just pop into my head. The Flood Lily was one of those. So then I construct a story around it. The basic premise of this story involves (though they are never actually named as such) vampires. I was writing this around the end of 2008. Twilight was a big deal, and it seemed like vampires were every where. And it got me thinking... does the world really need another vampire story?

True, I was going to put a sci-fi twist on it that I thought was kind of interesting and novel. Basically, the vampires were created through nanotechnology. The basic idea of the tech was to turn creatures into the perfect soldiers - undying creatures who fed on the blood of those they killed in battle. I'm sure something like this has been used in some book, film or TV show somewhere along the line. As much as I'd like to think it was a wholly original idea, there doesn't seem to be very many of those. But that didn't matter to me much at first. I figured as long as it was entertainingly done and felt fresh that's all I needed. But I spooked myself. I was so sick of vampires myself. If I had known better, I would have just kept writing. It might have taken a little bit, but I'd either have become comfortable with the idea or I would have figured out a new way to approach it.

Instead, I stopped. And I stopped for over a year and a half. Seriously, I did not write a sentence. It was an incredibly large amount of wasted time. I worked on a few things here and there, but for all intents and purposes I was no longer writing the book. Thankfully, I eventually came back to it. I just remember finding the file for the first book on my computer, and reading through it and thinking how much I enjoyed it and what a shame it was that I hadn't kept going. So I wrote the rest of the scene in the carriage before they reach the Durand Supplies building. But I was still afraid of the basic premise of the book. So I put the book away again until the end of the 2011. Another year down the tubes.

Of course, in the end it all worked out. I found the spark again. I realized that I would enjoy the story, and that was a good start. And you know what? It works. The story really works. I enjoy the initial mystery that is set-up. I like the introduction of Varias and his children. I like the sidetrip (via journal) to Tibet. I like the strange intermingling of vampires, tibetan monks and Victorian London. It's just a lot of fun to me, and I feel a bit silly that I ever worried about it.

As soon as this book was done, I dove right into writing the next book, where I had to fend off the dreaded spectre of... technobabble!

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...