I have commented before on the way stories and/or individual characters sometimes rebel.  I might have a detailed book plan when I start writing, but what do I know?  I’m only the author after all.  Ultimately, it’s as if the story writes itself and I just do as I’m told and provide the typing fingers.

Worse still, I don’t always get the choice of what book I’m actually writing and I’ve just had a classic example.  My next book, ‘Martine’ is written and all but ready for publication.  The book after that is called ‘Debbie’s Gift’ and I’d got it about half done when suddenly an entirely new book started to insist on being written.  It’s called ‘Sofia’, but it’s not the book after ‘Debbie’s Gift’, which is called ‘Fracture’.  It’s not even the one after that, which is also fully written and called ‘Gold’.  It’s at least five or six books further and set about fifteen years later in Saltbury time.

We all know sweet little mischief Sofie Fauld (or ’Monster’ as her family call her), but we are used to her being three to four years old.  In ‘Sofia’ she is not quite twenty, and trying to follow her mother, Debbie Stewart and her two older sisters, Roisin and Hazel, into music.  Why this book pounced on me now, I don’t know.  It will be around two years before the series catches up enough that I can publish it, but I now have a complete first draft.

The most fascinating thing though, was the way the story kept writhing and changing as I wrote.  Of course all my books do this to a degree as I think of new twists or details.  But this was orders of magnitude different.  Like most of my books there is a strong thread of romance, whatever else might be happening and ‘Sofia’ is no different.  I do usually know the ending well in advance and who my heroine will end up with.  Not this time though.  The ending kept changing completely: so much so, in fact, that I eventually found myself with four entirely different endings.

Now, there are such things as interactive novels, where this is done deliberately and the reader can guide the story or at least pick the ending they prefer.  Try doing that in a long series like the ‘Saltbury Chronicles’, though.  How do you even start the next book when the last one had four different endings?  That might mean the next book has four beginnings and if each variation again has four possible endings things will soon get very weird indeed.  So I picked the ending I thought was most interesting.

However, ‘Sofia’ is now sitting in the computerised equivalent of a desk drawer until I start to edit it nearer the time of publication.  Meanwhile I’m back trying try to get ‘Debbie’s Gift’ finished.  The trouble is, I can feel ‘Sofia’ still trying to evolve in the back of my mind.  So I have a nasty feeling that the second draft, when I do it, might be very different to the first.  That’s ‘Monster’ for you, I suppose.  She always was a contrary little madam!