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Another year another book…

18 January 2013
New blog Monday. 7 January 2013 !!!!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!! IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE FIRST 4 BOOKS IN THE SERIES DON’T READ THIS BLOG YET. So, another year, another blog and another book… Every time I do one of these it makes me think I should do them more often. “Yes,” I say, “I'm going to update this website every other week.” And whenever I do something interesting I think, “Yes, this will make a really good blog…” And then I get home and life gets in the way and I don't get round to writing my blog, or posting any pictures or updating this site in any way. All I seem able to do is tweet… and I've had a lot of requests through Twitter (and this website) from readers asking me what's going to happen in the new book, and when they’re going to see their favourite characters return. I gave quite a lengthy outline of my plan in my last proper blog, but things have changed since then as I've actually written the new book. So I think I'll give a full update and apologise for repeating anything I've said before… As some of you will know the series was originally intended to be a trilogy. And it was going to work as follows… The first book introduces us to the world, the disease, and the major characters - Maxie and Blue and Achilleus, Ollie, David and Jester. Plus, of course, Sam and the Kid. That book became The Enemy and it ends with the surviving Holloway kids leaving Buckingham Palace and setting off across London towards the Natural History Museum. The 2nd book was going to pick up straight after the 1st and would show the parallel stories of Sam and the Kid at the Tower Of London and the rest of the Holloway kids at the Natural History Museum (NHM), where they would begin to learn more about what was going on in the wider world. They would find out what other kids around London were up to and we would follow the growing threat of St George's sicko army in the North. This would lead on to the 3rd book, which was going to be all about a gigantic battle between St George's army and the combined army of kids in Hyde Park. However, those of you who have read books 2, 3 and 4 will have noticed two things. 1.) It’s not a trilogy any more (simple maths will have told you that). 2.) The Holloway kids have still not got to the Natural History Museum yet and the plots of books 2,3 and 4 don’t follow the original plan. This is what happened... Having written The Enemy I realised that book 2 might be a little slow if I stuck to my original plan. We would have to spend a lot of time meeting and getting to know all the new kids at the NHM and the Tower of London. I would have had to explain who they were and show how they had got there and what their back stories were. I’d been able to set up the 1st bunch of kids in The Enemy by showing them doing things. This wasn’t going to be possible in the 2nd book. I realised that not much was actually going to happen. It wasn’t dynamic enough. I didn't have a strong driving story to push it along, and I thought I’d take a different approach and use the 2nd book to set up all the new characters in an exciting, dramatic story of their own. That book eventually became The Dead, it starts a year before The Enemy and in its pages we follow the adventures of Ed and Jack and Bam, of mad Matt and Archie Bishop, of Brooke and her girlfriends, Alesha and Courtney. We also meet Jordan and DogNut, Wiki, Jibber-Jabber, Chris Marker the book nut, Justin the nerd and let’s not forget Greg the butcher and his son Liam. And of course poor Frédérique, who is older than she claims. We see them struggle into London, deal with the great fire and the battle of Lambeth bridge and we see them split into 2 groups. 1 group settling at the Tower of London and the other… we don’t know yet where they end up. They drive off in the lorry. I felt this was a good exciting story in its own right and it was fun to have a second group of characters who were as strong and important as the characters in the first book. I know a lot of people read The Dead first and for them these characters became the stars, but those who read the Enemy first will always feel that Blue and Maxie and the Holloway crew are the major characters in the series. The result of this new book was that I had a full cast of characters who the reader already knew living in the Tower of London and the NHM and so the next book could crack straight on with the story. However when I sat down to write it I realised I still had a few loose ends to tie up from the end of the Dead. I had to explain how Brooke had ended up at Buckingham Palace with her head bandaged. Originally I was going to get this out of the way in a couple of chapters - the story of DogNut travelling up the river and finding Brooke at the Natural History Museum. The friends setting off for the Tower of London but being ambushed on the way. And then, as I wrote I began to feel felt that there was a lot more to the story than I'd originally realised and it expanded to fill a whole book – The Enemy. This was something I had never intended, but I liked DogNut, and I liked the new villain, The Collector, and I liked the story of the death of Olivia and how it sends her brother Paul mad. And I really liked the major new character, Shadowman. Shadowman’s story is important because he follows St George and we see first hand what the King Of The Sickos is up to so that we never forget this huge, growing, threat. It did mean, though, that I was no closer to writing my original planned second book, and the whole series had now expanded to 5 books. So I then sat down to write that ‘2nd book’, and pick up the story of Maxie, Blue, Achilleus, Ollie, Sam and the Kid (plus the characters from The Dead that they’d met – Brooke, Ed and the others). Halfway through the book, however, I realised that it was going to be incredibly long and incredibly complicated because there were so many different storylines weaving through it. There’s the story of The Holloway kids at the Museum, the story of Sam and the Kid crossing London, the story of Shadowman and St George in north London… and, to make it even more complicated, a group of kids leaves the NHM to go off on a new quest to find medical supplies. So I was juggling four storylines and the book was getting way too complicated. After a lot of head scratching and talks with my brilliant editor, Amada Punter, and with my own boys, who are the first people to read the books (who have a big input into the series), I decided to split the book into 2. 1 book would follow Sam and the kids from the Tower of London, plus Shadowman. The other book would follow The other Holloway kids at the NHM and the breakaway group going off to get supplies. Perhaps controversially I chose to tell Sam’s story first, in the book that became The Sacrifice. I know this is frustrating for some readers because it means that they are still waiting to find out what happened to Maxie and Blue. But it does tell a very important story and reintroduces mad Matt bat and shows his set up at St Paul's. It also meant I could give proper space to Shadowman and his adventures, because I know a lot of readers really like him as a character. And then there’s Wormwood, The Green Man, who’s going to be very important to the overall story. I have now finished the next book – The Fallen – so I can tell you a little about what happens without, I hope, spoiling it for you. The events in The Fallen run parallel to the events in the Sacrifice and the two books can be read in any order. (In fact when the series is finished I might have to draw little chart of possible ways to read this series, so that you could, for instance, still read what was intended to be the original trilogy of The Enemy, The Fallen and a final book in the series, which will be called The End.) I like the idea of stories overlapping and events being told from the point of view of different characters in different books. It’s fun to find out what was going on somewhere else when we were concentrating on one group of characters. Anyway, The Fallen does indeed pick up straight after the end of The Enemy and starts with Blue, Maxie, Achilleus, Ollie and the others arriving at the Natural History Museum. If you’ve read The Fear, however, you’ll know that it's going to be no picnic for them when they arrive. If you remember, The Fear ends with Paul releasing his captive sickos and opening the locked doors to the basement area at the Museum and unleashing hell into the museum. So The Fallen starts with a battle in and I hope the excitement never lets up from there on in. We get to see what happens at the Museum and we watch as half the kids set off on an expedition to find medical and scientific supplies. One of the important things that happens in The Sacrifice is we start to learn more about the disease and in The Fallen we find out even more still… What the kids find when they arrive at the medical warehouse is not what they were expecting at all. So I hope fans of Maxie and Blue will be happy that their favourite characters are finally back centre stage with a whole book to themselves. I've really enjoyed writing this new story, and it's been great to spend some time with some one of the original characters again. I can’t quite believe it's been five years since I wrote The Enemy. The Fallen will be out in the UK in September and in Spring 2014 in America. Before then both UK paperback of The Sacrifice and the US version will be out over this spring. In the meantime I have to think about what sort of a film we might make to promote The Fallen … We’ll probably try something different this year. I'll keep you posted when we start to put some ideas together.
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