Writing Book 5

The Paradox Club series continues!

The adventure that began in THE VALENTINE TRAP continues in a new direction with Book Five, A GIRL CALLED VALENTINE.

Writing the fifth Paradox Club novel was a very different experience compared to the first four. My “time travel love story” had plenty of time travel in the first four books, and some romance between various characters. But with Book Five, it was time to write the “love story” part. Which proved to be more of a challenge than I expected…

The original idea was to write a trilogy covering how Valentine and Milo met, how they ended up being accidental time travellers and their first adventures in The Chronoverse. It was always the intention to hint at a bigger ongoing story happening behind the scenes that would drive the rest of the books, leading to the eventual climactic conclusion.

But I quickly realised that if I started writing with how Valentine and Milo met, it would be quite a while before there was any time travel in the story and I wanted to get into the action right away. And I did love that opening line “By the time you finish reading this sentence, Phillipa Audrey will be dead.”

So instead of starting with Valentine and Milo, I started with one of the stories going on around them, that was related to them, and used that to introduce them instead. Which is one of the reasons why we’re only now meeting them properly in Book Five instead of Book One.

If I’ve learned anything from setting out on my Self Publishing Adventure it’s this:

Trust Your Creativity. It Knows What It’s Doing.

Science tells us that you not only have neurons [brain cells] in your brain, they are also present in your heart and your gut. Which is not only fascinating in and of itself, it also makes sense of our “gut instinct”. So going with your gut, trusting your instincts when it comes to your writing, is my biggest takeaway from writing these first five books.

Here’s an example. In Book Two I write about how Deborah Whitefield “bought” her father, Sir Edward, a present for his birthday that subsequently went missing. At the time I wrote that, it was simply a little side mystery, a point of additional intrigue.

At the time I wrote it, it was a spontaneous addition, and I had no idea what the present in question was or why it was missing. If you had asked me, I wouldn’t have been able to give you an answer. During the writing process for Book Five, however, I got the answer to what it was and where it went and that will be a plot element in Book Six.

So first, my Inner Creativity came up with that plot element but didn’t give me an explanation for it. But I trusted that it was “right” to include it in the book, so I did. Three books later, the missing answer to that question of what it was and where it went, was revealed to me.

Why did it take so long? I have no idea, but something tells me that either my Creativity had the answer all the time but didn’t reveal it to me, since it wasn’t the right time for it, or it was working away in the background all the time to come up with one.

Either way, that unanswered question in Book Two will be answered in Book Six.

But back to Book Five. In this book readers finally meet Valentine and Milo properly and learn more about them. Since they are the real heroes of the series moving forward, it’s time to introduce them for real and show how they met and how, and more importantly why, they became a couple. But, as is fast becoming the norm, for Valentine and Milo, things aren’t as simple as that…

Also, despite what she thought at the end of Book Four, it turns out that Victoria Winter’s part in this story isn’t over after all. When I wrote the fourth book I thought it was too, I genuinely did. Turns out I was wrong and my Inner Creativity had other plans, which I’ve gone along with once again, since I trust it and it seems to know what it’s doing.

We also meet some new characters, such as Mandrake the temporal assassin, who will also be in Book Six, which is where what remains from the previous books will be resolved so that Valentine and Milo can start adventuring properly in Book Seven.