The first thing my twin said to me on Friday: “I dreamed about the apocalypse.”
Fiction writers’ conversations must sound really weird to people who don’t know they’re talking about fiction.
I don’t know the word count on the WIP (third book in a five-book series) right now, other than that it’s above 25K.
Over the weekend, we talked a lot about timing of some of the events that must happen before the end of this series. Stuff that Paul thought needed to happen in book three… actually shouldn’t happen until book four, and then there’s stuff that has to happen in book four because of how much time passes in part of that other series, the one that has four of its five books already published. So Paul doesn’t need to try to fit a couple of years’ of other characters’ lives into twenty thousand words of this book.
On the other hand, it’s currently late August of 2012, in story, and it has been decided by the author and his twin that the upcoming New Year’s Eve is that New Year’s Eve. So the difficult conversation between Geoffrey and his housemate happens in October…
Also, Marleah Carlisle’s grandmother has been introduced in the story. Not that she’s Marleah’s grandmother now, but still… (Marleah is a character in “that novel.”)
Other story things we discussed:
Even though it doesn’t happen until the next book, Paul has been working out some of the details of how Jon and Em meet. This time, Em won’t be by himself; Lyra will be there, too. Paul said something about ‘giving Lyra her own book some day.’ (He really, really wants to know what happened between Lyra and Morgen back before Morgen joined the Auroran Circle. He also wants to write about how the previous Circle broke. I had to remind him that the final straw in that conflict was Lyra bringing Ryan into the Circle — it had nothing to do with Morgen, except peripherally.) At least he didn’t say anything about Jon having his own novel some day. (It’s not actually a movie quote that comes to mind right now, but rather a recurring line in a small series of movie trailers: “Get your own movie!” various Disney characters say to Stitch when he shows up in what appear to be trailers for their movies. So of course, “I would never… make more than one,” also comes to mind.)
Because Marleah’s grandmother is in the story now (primary motivation: Paul wrote a minor character he really likes, and he doesn’t want this character to die horribly in a few years… so there needs to be a good in-story reason why she doesn’t), of course we talked some about “that novel” and books more closely connected to it. And about the ship folk in the much later stories — Paul mentioned “Wabe and later,” because so far the only fully written stories I have for that general era are “Finder’s Fee” and “Ice Is Also Great.”
North of Andover 