The Paradox Club series continues!
The adventure that began in THE VALENTINE TRAP continues with THE GHOST IN THE MIRROR.
So, was writing my second novel any easier than writing my first? On balance, yes. The first book had to all the heavy lifting in terms of world building. It had to introduce all the characters, set up the story world and all the other things a first novel has to do to interest readers enough to come back for Book Two. With all that done and out of the way, it was a case of moving the plot forward.
The entire Paradox Club series is intended to be an epic adventure across multiple books. I know how it ends and so all the books are a step on the road towards that story destination. The intention is that each successive novel will take us a little bit further on that journey to The End.
THE VALENTINE TRAP introduced the reader to a whole host of characters:
PHILLIPA AUDREY. SUSAN CAMPBELL. “JOHN SMITH”. SIMMS. PENNY & TUPPENCE. VICTORIA WINTER. CAPTAIN MOORE & MATRON HODGKIN. VALENTINE and MILO.
In THE GHOST IN THE MIRROR, we meet a few new characters and all I’ll say for now is that not every character from Book One is in Book Two. But every one of them in Book Two is there for a sound story reason, as readers will discover for themselves as the series continues.
If the central characters of Book One were John Smith and Susan Cambell, the central characters of Book Two are Deborah Whitefield and her Ghost, the ghost who lives in her mirror. But Susan and Smith continue their journey and we follow Victoria Winter’s story too.
The first writing task I set myself for 2021 wasn’t writing Book Two, but updating one of my earlier books, The Next Prime Minister, to take account of events since the publication of the original. With that done, the decks were cleared of Outstanding Projects and I was able to continue my Paradox Club journey.
One of the first things I did when starting work on Book Two was to map out the story in Plottr, something that really helped visualise what was going on with each character. It’s a useful piece of software but, like so many others out there, rather gimmicky, a potential distraction and not really essential. It was a fun exercise but I doubt I’ll use it again.
There were five plot threads for the different groups of characters from Book One and, looking at them all laid out, it seemed to me that things would be easier for readers to follow if we split them across two books instead of putting them all into one. Which is what I did.
As a result, I made the decision to not follow the journey of every character from Book One in Book Two. As such, some of the characters from Book One won’t reappear until Book Three. Not that I’m telling you which ones they are…
Endings are tricky things to get right and, like Book One, Book Two also ends on a cliffhanger that gets resolved in Book Three. Neither ending was intentional, but as I wrote them, they both felt like natural end points. Rather than self-contained stories, this series is more like One Big Story told across multiple books.
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