The Paradox Club series continues!

The adventure that began in THE VALENTINE TRAP and continued in THE GHOST IN THE MIRROR & THE DIAMOND OF TOMORROW enters its “final” chapter with THE SERPENT STRATEGY.

Writing the fourth Paradox Club novel was a whole new challenge compared to the first three. Unlike those first three, there was a lot less Improvising and a lot more Plotting involved in the creation of this one.

With it being the climax of the story that began in the first book, which has really been going on since before the first book, I had to work out how to connect the various characters and their individual plot threads together in a way that both author and reader alike would be satisfied with.

There are a lot of characters in these first four books, and not all of them get a “curtain call” appearance at the end of the final act of the story I’ve been telling. But some of them do and when casting the finale it was a case of who needs to be there rather than who do I want to be there.

Having set up so many things over the previous three books, I was conscious of the need to pay at least some of them off. Readers would be expecting that to happen, so I couldn’t disappoint them. That said, I purposely left other plot threads unresolved, because I know that they will get paid off further down the line.

With no Amazon reviews for any of the books as yet, there’s no feedback whatsoever to go on. Which means I’m continuing to write only for myself rather than also for my audience. Mostly because I don’t really have an audience yet, making it impossible to give them more of what they like and want as I’ve no idea what that is!

I’m writing by instinct, writing the sort of book that I want to read, telling the sort of story I’d like to see on the screen. Who knows, maybe one day, The Paradox Club will make it there. But now we’re really getting ahead of ourselves!

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 take the reader one step further down the narrative road towards the final story destination. Knowing how it ends before you start means you can do all that foreshadowing stuff on purpose because you know what’s coming further down the line.

The first four books – THE VALENTINE TRAP, THE GHOST IN THE MIRROR, THE DIAMOND OF TOMORROW and THE SERPENT STRATEGY together form what I like to think of as the equivalent of Phase One of the MCU.

After Phase One, again without getting spoiler-y, the story continues in Phase Two but goes in a slightly different direction and many of the characters from the first four books exit the story stage, their part in it over. Unless I end up being compelled to bring them back, of course…

So what is Paradox Club Phase One? Well, you can think of it as something akin to the Star Wars prequels. They give you the full story but you can start with Book Five, which is where things really get going.

Although the main Story Arc starts in Book Five, which is the story of Valentine and Milo, how they met and what they did that made Leviathan want them dead, Books One through Four aren’t just backstory. They introduce the reader to the story world and some of the characters they have met will pop up again in future books. Because I know where this is going. I just hope I’m not the only one who thinks the journey is going to be worth it…

So at the end of Book Four, there are SPOILERS two plotlines that we can follow. One of them will lead us to Book Five, which is where we meet Valentine and Milo properly and follow their story. Their story is the story that began before The Valentine Trap.

The other plotline is what happened to Valentine and Milo after the events of The Serpent Strategy. That’s a story we will eventually come back to. But not yet. For now, we need to meet Valentine and Milo properly. Through the first four books they’ve only been background characters as we learn who they are and why Leviathan are after them. But in Book Five they take centre stage.

Book Five is where we learn how they met and fell in love and just what it was they did in the future that Leviathan want to change. I have a whole series of adventures planned for Valentine and Milo, I know where they’re going and I know how their story ends. It’s a journey I’ve been wanting to take them on for over twenty-five years now and soon it will finally begin…