The Paradox Club Book Five – A Girl Called Valentine – is the book where we finally get to see how Valentine and Milo met and it sets the stage for Book Six, which is where they start down the road that will lead to them being the ones to bring down Leviathan.
Writing the fifth book turned out to be more of a challenge than I expected. It’s always good to flex your writing muscles and with this book I did something I’d not done in the previous four books – romance. Yes, there was Debs and Ghost in Book Two but on that occasion the attraction was hers. Ghost’s feelings remain unknown.
The Paradox Club series is essentially action adventure, the sort of stuff I like to read as a reader. I’m not big on romance novels, though I like a good, emotionally involving romantic story as much as anyone. But writing one?
Since Valentine and Milo are the real heroes of the series, you can’t not show how they met and how their relationship formed and developed. That central relationship between the two of them is what is going to help drive the narratives of the upcoming books, so how they met is an Obligatory Scene you have to write.
But, unlike the action adventure stuff of Mayfair Strange and Victoria Winter, or John Smith and Susan Campbell, writing the beginnings of Valentine and Milo was something that I found it a real challenge to do justice to.
The book, like all the previous ones, ended up being very different from what I had planned. Every book starts off with an outline, but I’ve learned that it’s best, for me anyway, to treat that outline as more of a sketch than a blueprint. As someone who considers themselves a Plotter rather than an Improviser, I’m constantly surprised by just how much improvising I do when I’m writing up my plot!
The binary choice between being a Plotter or an Improviser (I refuse to use the term Pantser) is a false choice. From my experience, the truth is that all writing is a combination of what you’ve already worked out beforehand and what you make up on the spot, in the moment. Of the five books I’ve written so far, every single one was started with an already existing outline, but every single one ended up being more than 50% improvised, sometimes a lot more. Book five was no different from the others.
The end conditions of the characters at the close of Book Four, coupled with the feeling that we needed some increased jeopardy early on, resulted in the book spinning off in an entirely unplanned direction. And, like every book so far, characters who weren’t in my head when I started ended up presenting themselves for inclusion. Which is where Mandrake came from.
As someone who isn’t a natural romance writer, it was a real challenge to write scenes that showed the growing relationship between my two heroes that I felt was both believable, in so far as the heightened reality of fiction will allow for, and relatable.
So your two heroes are a couple, and they’re in love with each other? Okay, but you can’t contrive that relationship, you have to give the reader a relatable reason for why they fell for each other, especially why she fell for him and chose him rather than any of her other options.
Milo finds Valentine attractive? Well, of course he does. That’s what men do, they are attracted to and stimulated by what they see. If she ticks that box, then he’ll see if the contents match up to the packaging.
Her attraction to him is less physical and more emotional. It’s a lie that women are attracted to men in the same way that men are attracted to women. Looks matter much less to women than they do to men, but men continue to fall for the deception that women are only interested in men who look like Brad Pitt and are built like Jason Mamoa. The reason this deception is so effective is that, on the surface, it seems to be true. It’s only when you start to question it that you realise how false it is.
So when it came to how to make Valentine and Milo a couple, I did what most writers do, I drew on my own experiences and imagination to create a scene that was both romantic and plausible. It took quite a while to craft that section of the book, and I learned that writing “romance” isn’t one of my strengths as a writer. But stretching your creative muscles is a good thing and I’m pleased with how it turned out. And it sets the stage for Book Six, which is where, having crossed the line from friends to lovers, things start to change for them both…
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