The plan for Paradox Club Book Six – Valentine And Milo – was for it to be the book where they become reluctant time travellers, setting out on the path that will eventually lead to them defeating Leviathan in the future. It didn’t quite work out like that, though…
This book, like all the others so far in the series, was a combination of Outlining and Improvising and, again, I ended up Improvising a lot more than I had Outlined.
When I was planning the book, I knew that it had to get Valentine and Milo started on their time travels, which meant getting them to the party where it all started. At that party they meet Lord and Lady Rathven who explain, for the benefit of both the characters themselves and the reader, how time travel works in the series. And it doesn’t involve a time machine…
However, with other plotlines vying for attention, the result was that Valentine and Milo won’t get lost in the Chronoverse quite yet…
When I first outlined the series in my head, it was, believe it or not, a trilogy. Yet, here we are on Book Six, with Book Seven waiting in the wings. The story grew in the telling, as they say, and where I left the characters at the end of the previous book dictated the structure of this one.
First, I had the Valentine and Milo of 1988 who were about to go through a time door into the past for the first time. Next, I had the Valentine and Milo who were working with The League of Temporal Gentlemen in the Victorian Era. Then I had Mandrake, the Minister of Time and Dr Parish at Ravenfell, which was where I had left them at the end of Book Five, and so I had to continue their story too. And finally there was Mandrake’s Valentine, and what happened to her after the fight with Mortlake at the Time Ministry…
So with multiple characters in different places and times and multiple plotlines to resolve, the first thing to do was to work out how I was going to get all those characters from where they were to where I needed them to be. And the key to that was The Paradox Club…
When I was first trying to come up with a name for the series, it was simply called Valentine And Milo. But then, over time, it became The Paradox Club, which I thought was more engaging, and more appropriate for a Time Travel, Adventure & Romance series. Since The Club had, under Madeleine Moriarty, allied itself with Leviathan, the Big Bad of the series, it felt right to have the heroes take the fight to them. A fight made personal by a future Valentine falling into their clutches.
And so I knew the main thrust of Book Six would be two plotlines. The first was Valentine and Milo in 1988 learning all about how time travel works and going through a time door for the first time. That was the plotline I already had worked out before I wrote the book. The second was the downfall of The Paradox Club, which was the plotline I improvised as I was writing the book.
Six books in, I’ve learned to trust my Creativity, it knows what it’s doing. As an example, let’s go all the way back to Book Two, The Ghost In The Mirror…
In that book, Deborah Whitefield’s father, Sir Edward, dies. The unopened box containing his birthday present has been opened but it’s empty and the contents are nowhere to be found. So what was in the box and what happened to it?
Well, I can tell you now that, when I wrote that, I had no idea! It was simply a nice little unsolved mystery for readers to ponder and, hopefully, come up with their own answers. It was an example of what I call “Fanspace” which is when a story hints at something but doesn’t elaborate on it, allowing engaged fans to speculate on it and have some fun.
An example of Fanspace is the line “I was with the Fillipino army during its advance on Rekyavik” from the Doctor Who story The Talons of Weng-Chiang. There’s no detail on how or why an army from the Phillipines was in Iceland to fight a battle, which, if that juxtaposition fires your imagination, gives you endless hours of fun trying to work out for yourself why and how that happened.
When it came to Book Six, while I was working on Bok Five and thinking about how to outline the next book, my Creativity gave me the answer to that unsolved mystery from Book Two. Now that I knew why the opened present box was empty, that gave me a third plotline that I had to add to the other two. To anyone reading the books, but not this blogpost, it might look like it was planned all along but now you know it wasn’t!
As a result of this relatively late addition to my plotting process, I brought back two characters that aren’t as dead as they may have appeared to be, but in my head, they were never dead. They were always going to return but now they are joined by a new character who will come between them and mix things up a little…
Book Seven will follow directly on from Book Six and will follow Milo as he goes through the time door after Valentine, and Victoria Winter after she steps through the time door in a certain mirror readers amy be familiar with. Both of them will find the unexpected on the other side…
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