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 were going to form what, collectively, I regarded as Phase One of the story, the equivalent of Phase One of the MCU. That was the plan when I finished this fourth book.
However, as I started plotting out Book Five, I realised that Book Four wasn’t really the ending of Phase One that I initially thought it would be. Rather, the next few books will be a continuation of Phase One, with Book Four as more of a pause for breath than a conclusion.
In terms of characters’ stories, some of them end here, but others will continue. And there are two characters in particular whose story hasn’t even really started yet…
Although Valentine & Milo have featured in the first four books, we need to meet them properly. Rather than them being incidental characters, in Book Five they take centre stage.
Book Five is where we learn how they met and fell in love and get our first clues about what it was they did in the future that Leviathan want to change.
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