The Paradox Club Book Seven – Future Times Past – is the book that closes out what, in my head, I’ve always viewed as Phase One of the Paradox Club series.
I took my inspiration from the MCU, viewing the entire series as being in three Phases.
Phase One is the first seven books in the series, from The Valentine Trap to Future Times Past, and it ends with Valentine and Milo – SPOILERS! – lost in the Chronoverse and about to have all sorts of adventures in Phase Two.
Although the whole thing was originally planned as a trilogy, it has grown and grown to the point where Phase One has essentially been one big story told across seven books. That ends with this book.
Phase Two is planned as a series of several standalone adventures for Valentine and Milo which will have an “arc” but one won’t lead directly into the other. The plan is for them to be more self contained and each one will tell a different story. Any new characters introduced will only be for that book, and there are currently no plans to have multiple characters and plotlines like we had in Phase One.
Phase Three, which is only at the Outline stage right now, will see the series return to the linked books style of Phase One, with each book leading into the next one as the plot circles back around on itself as the series races to its conclusion.
The main challenge with this book was to get all the characters, besides our heroes Valentine and Milo, to where I needed them to be for Phase Two. And, as ever, there was a lot of improvised content that I came up with spontaneously that I incorporated into my original outline and scene breakdown.
Taking Victoria Winter as an example, although readers knew about the transition from Deborah Whitefield to Victoria Winter, and from Susan Campbell to Phillipa Audrey, they hadn’t been given the transition from Victoria Winter to Susan Campbell. So that had to be done in this book.
All that material, along with quite a bit else, was improvised as I was writing, and wasn’t planned for. But, although it slowed progress somewhat as I worked it all out, I’m pleased with what I came up with and how I plugged that gap in her story. As part of that process, I managed to incorporate an idea I’d had for some time, The Boy Who Loved Trains.
It’s a short film idea I had which was inspired by a piece of music I heard. Sometimes evocative music will promote a series of images in your mind’s eye, and that’s how TBWLT came about. Since I knew it would never get made as the short film I’d seen in my head, I worked it into the story, organically, and it ties in to the story of one character in particular…
This book also gives us some more backstory on Susan Campbell’s time crystal, the one that Valentine inherits after her gran dies. All I’ll say for now is that it has something to do with Sir Edward Whitefield…
And so, Valentine and Milo are now officially on the run. The hunt is on, and, wherever they go in the Chronoverse, Leviathan will never be far behind them…
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