Preparation and remembering the beginning

Okay. Deep breath. Time for a bit of nervous excitement – next week I start writing the first draft of The Fortress of Black Glass. Of all three books, this is the one I’m seriously nervous about for three reasons.

The foremost reason is that I want to finish the trilogy well – I want a big boom, rather than an anti-climatical whimper. There’s nothing worse than building up to a climax, especially in a series, only for a lack-lustre ending after 400,000 words or 7 hours of movie time. Just look at the Matrix trilogy, or Pirates of the Caribbean. I could mention a few writers too, but for the sake of solidarity (and because it’s my opinion only) I’ll not mention them here.

Secondly, after plans to write The Traitor of Light were scotched, I have to write book four without having written book three, so in effect The Fortress of Black Glass is book three now, making it a nicely rounded trilogy, though with a fair bit of exposition to be negotiated (no one really likes the “in last week’s episode…” thang, so I’ve got a fair bit of work to do tying up the ends of Hoard of Mhorrer with the opening chapter to Fortress).

The third reason is more immediate, and is not completely in my hands…

…Like it or not, I have a tight-rope to tread, but there’s a strong gale blowing. It’s quite obvious to me, from anecdotal evidence and what I’m reading in the Press and on-line, that the recession is taking a big bite out of publishing. Like it or not, the mid-listers who enjoyed certain creative freedoms at the expense of bestseller incomes are finding themselves without publishers, and new writers are finding they are having to prove themselves more and more, all because of the balance sheet. The recession is forcing the industry to shrink its output, adopting a gastric band to ensure they remain competitive but more importantly, solvent.
I have two published books to my name, but I am a relatively new author with a lot still to prove. Whether or not I am allowed to prove myself will largely depend on whether The Fortress of Black Glass is appealing enough, but also how the first two books are doing commercially. The latter situation is out of my hands now – other than turning myself into a crazed publicity machine, there is little more I can do to get the books selling more than they are (writers can sometimes spend too much time selling and too little time writing – you need to have that balance).

So that leaves the first condition for me to work on: making sure The Fortress of Black Glass is compelling. What I’ve learnt from my short time as a published novelist is that once you set out your store, you have very little room to change the merchandise. Publishers like it when you hit a winning formula and they like more of the same, as long as it’s fresh and entertaining. It’s almost a contradiction on the surface and there is a fine line between too much change and too little difference but that’s the tight-rope a series writer must approach.
For me, The Fortress of Black Glass needs to be a heavy-weight book. The previous two were romps, adventures that hark back to the old cliff-hanger serials with buckles that are swashed and feats of extreme heroism, tinged in the blood and the grime of dark fantasy. And largely they were quests, either for mcguffins or for experience. The Fortress of Black Glass doesn’t exactly break that formula, just bends it. This is a book about vengeance and will be so much darker. It will return to the adventuring element – there will still be the battles, the hectic skirmishes and the pyrotechnics of the first two books - but there’ll be that sense of finality with regard to the fates of quite a few of the characters, and how the whole story has gone full circle from the Secret War.
A big part of that is thinking about who my readers are - which I find ironic as I didn’t have a broad audience in mind when I started writing the first book nine years ago. The audience I’ve found since The Secret War was published isn’t exactly the audience I expected.
And as an entertainer, you ignore your audience at your peril.

When I wrote The Secret War I was writing for the big kid in me. If you want a category of age, I would say between 14 and 17. So really, if there was an audience in mind for the first book, it was teenage boys. The fact The Secret War has been adopted by each side of that age range and by women as well, means that I misjudged my audience – in a good way. I am not deluded into believing the Secret War books are high-brow literature. They were never meant to be. They're escapism. I think we all like a bit of adventure and hopefully I've delivered that for those who enjoy a bit of an escape now and again (misery novels they are not!).
If I aim for that audience again, yet without compromising on the dark stuff, I should achieve something that Macmillan can’t say no to, and a book that my readership will embrace with the same fondness as the previous two.
Well, that’s the plan anyway.

When I start The Fortress of Black Glass next week, I will do so with more pressure than previously put upon me. Some of it will be welcome, some of it will not. I know there’s going to be a few casualties over the next year or so in terms of my peers across the publishing world, and I know that where there is solidarity amongst authors (especially within MNW) there might also be discord from those outside this circle, but as a writer all I can do is write my best novel yet and let it be judged on those merits.
Everything else is sadly out of my hands…