Quiet Times

Things have slowed down quite a bit sales-wise on the G&W books. It's to be expected. There is no longer the bump of free books to give it any promotion, and I haven't been doing a ton other than these blogs. This is a somewhat planned down time. There are things afoot. Actually, there are things afoot I had planned to talk about sooner, but it'll be a couple more months at least before I can share.

This has all been an interesting road. I just wanted to say thank you again to all the readers who took a chance or are taking a chance on Grace and Witherbloom. It's been great to see a good amount of readers rate it on Goodreads.com. If you haven't already, I encourage you to add the books to your read or to-read list and rate them! I'd love to read some reviews, too, of course there and on Amazon.

I'm intrigued to see what the future brings. I have had my mind percolating on a few ideas about what to write next. But I'm not settled on anything quite yet. In any case, there are still three more installments of the spoilerific Story Behind The Story series. I hope someone has been enjoying reading them or finding them interesting! If not, I'll just tell myself they are here for the sake of posterity. :)

That's all for now. Feel free to drop me a line if the mood strikes you or you have any comments or questions. Until next time.

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.

Grace & Witherbloom - The Comic Strip!?!

Well, here it is! I promised you this way back when in the non-spoilery series of blogs I did on the origins of Grace & Witherbloom. Now, I think enough time has passed from the release of the stories to show this to the world.

For those of you who did not read the other blogs, let me quickly explain. G&W was originally created as a web comic. I submitted it to the now defunct Zuda Comics and it was summarily rejected. You had to tell the start of the story in 8 pages. That is what you'll see here and that's all that exists! There are quite a few differences between this initial comic and the eventual book:

1. Helen is not a kid!
2. She has a young niece called Kathy!
3. The story takes place in modern times!

And a few other things not worthy of exclamation points or numbering. :) The basic plot was slightly similar to what became the Village That Sleeps, although there were significant changes to the locale and the nature of the main threat.

Anyway, enjoy and I'd love to hear what you think of this very different vision. I much prefer what I ended up with in the books, I must confess. Also, please remember this was created over five years ago. So some of the writing isn't indicative of what I do today. :)

The full comic can be seen below.

Open publication - Free publishing - More novel

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...