In part one I talked about how the how concept kicked off. The original short story came out as the introduction to Dark Furies and was titled Strange Angel and that was it. I moved on. I started thinking about what I wanted to tackle next. There were a lot of ideas rattling around in my head and I wasn’t certain where I wanted to go, at all.

Now, I admit part of that mix was a nagging feeling about Susie Sparrow. I felt like she had such a tiny slice of life on the page. Two thousand words isn’t a lot and yet in that time I found myself oddly attached to her. I started to play with finding a story for a character just like her.

A few days later I was on the phone with Vince again. We tended to, especially then, talk at least once a week. We’d go on for long hours into the night about movies and books and cover design and life and just have a good time of it. Sometimes we would even talk work, if there was any.

I asked him, I remember, if maybe he would be interested in contracting a longer form story about Susie. There was something there, and I wanted to be able to chase it. He laughed and told me he had been thinking the same thing. It turned out that my short little story had sparked the same resonance in him that it has for me. So he was more than happy to ask me to write him something else.

But what?

Well we had an epically long conversation (I remember I still had a house phone then, a cordless, and I killed that battery and switched to my cell and eventually killed that battery.) wherein we both plotted out some of the rough bones of the story. It’s why the eventual product does list him as co-plotter. He brought a lot to the table, ideas he always wanted to see played with that suddenly fit perfectly into this madcap concept we were building.

But the truth it, outside of a few raw concepts (which, again, I adore and never would have found on my own) and two scenes in the eventual product, we didn’t plot any story. We just found really interesting directions to go, some back story and some world building. It’s plot, and it is critical. But what happened was my fault.

See, we agreed that, since he still wanted to play with that smaller page count format (see Part One and the Olson twin novels) that instead of one novel I would write the book as a series of three novellas.

I came up with a basic plot and sold it to him as a story with a ton of action and explosions and I remember using the phrase “like dinosaurs with jetpacks fighting school busses with missiles” more than once. This thing was going to be “full of explodo” as I kept promising.

Except when I got down to work on it – it wasn’t. Now don’t get me wrong, the story has a lot of action, but the majority of it became a character drama. Susie was an interesting character to take out of the box and play with, and I found myself having too much fun doing that in Book One to really remember to blow someone up every ten pages or so.

Now, do I think the book failed because it didn’t have enough action? Not at all. The action it did have was denser and tighter and the character beats were large and carried the reader through. I think it was a great success, actually. But I know Vince expected something very different from our talks.

So I finished Book One and it got good reviews and sold a decent amount and I had the bones of books two and three in front of me. See, this series was going to be a 70+ page novella every 6 months for 18 months. As soon as I finished one I had to leap into the next. Not crushing or deadly, it just meant I never got a chance to really stop.

Well, except … but that’s for next time.