I’ve said it before, but I seldom write my books in the order you will see in the published version.  Quite often the ending comes first and then I work out how to get there, writing individual scenes in an almost random order, then gradually reassembling them to make a logical whole.  It’s rather like filmmaking, in fact.  But at least I do know what the ending is to be.  Well, usually I do.

You also know that even the books of the ‘Saltbury Chronicles’ series haven’t always been written in the right order.  They follow a definite chronology, with each scene carrying a date.  And book 1, ‘Haze’ starts very precisely at 8.15 a.m. on Monday 1st October 2001, with a sixteen year old Hazel walking to catch the school bus.

‘Haze’ wasn’t the first Saltbury book I wrote, though.  It was the second.  The first to be written was book 5, ‘Red’ which is set four years later.  I then confused the hell out of the Kindle self publication computer, by publishing the first five books in the order 1, 5, 2, 3, 4.  It really didn’t like that, which is a pity because I’ve had book 14 written for over a year now.  I even have the cover design for it.  It’s called ‘Gold’ and it would be very topical at the moment because Carol and Tina play detective against sports cheating by a former Soviet Republic run by a dictator called Viktor Tyrancov.  Any resemblance to any actual Russian dictators is purely coincidental, I assure you.  I’d love to be able to publish it instead of book 10, when my next one comes out on March 17^th but I’d better not upset the computer again.  It sulked for months last time and for a while gave the royalties to the wrong Jo Brodie.

To be extra confusing, I have just finished the first draft of what will be book 15 or 16 when it finally comes out.  It’s called ‘Sofia’, and features Hazel’s wonderfully maddening little sister Sofie.  She’s all grown up now and trying to make it as a musician in 2021, in a Saltbury universe that’s mercifully free of covid.  Again, why am I writing this book so far out of sequence?  I don’t know.  It just seemed to be the one that wanted to be written, and it will be odd going back to the next one I really need to get on with, ‘Debbie’s Gift’ in which Sofie is still only four.

‘Sofia’ has proved to be the most difficult to write of any of my books to date.  The story kept writhing under my typing fingers and the ending in particular kept changing utterly.  I ended up writing four entirely different endings before I got to the one I plan to publish.  For a moment I considered including them all.  I could put it out as one of those interactive novels in which the reader picks the ending they like best.  The trouble is that in a series like the ‘Saltbury Chronicles’, things would soon get horribly complicated.  The next book might have to have four different beginnings, or even be four different books, so I think I might pass on that one.

At least with my normal publication rate of three books per year, it will be two years till ’Sofia’ comes out, so I can file the first draft and forget about it for a year or more.  Maybe when I get back to it, it will evolve again and Sofie will have an entirely different girlfriend or, who knows, possibly even a boyfriend: stranger things have happened after all.