6 August 2011

My email. I shares it.

Hi! I found your first book at Amazon and got it for my Kindle, loved it, and then bought all the others. I read them all in a week, and my eyes kind of hurt now. I Googled you and found your blog and want to be your stalker. Ha ha ha, not really, but I read back a ways and looked at your pink pictures. Anyway, is the flipside of here the last book? Is there going to be another one in the series? Can you be bribed? I won’t even ask you to wear spandex! :)

I love getting (nice) email about my work, truly I do. I often get email from fans of Max, but for myself, not so much. I’m not sure what that says about my work, but there we have it. Max is still far more popular (for a while last year I was outselling him 10 to 1. Karma bit me in the ass when I pointed at him and said, “There ya go, you little &$^#*@”.)

I tend to respond to positive “fan mail” (quotes because I’m not clear whether or not it counts as fan mail…and yeah, I’ve answered negative mail, too, but it’s hard to be nice when someone has just emailed YOU SUCK…) and a few times I’ve had fairly lengthy correspondences with the people who kindly take the time to find me and drop a line.

Almost always, there’s the question: will there be more to the Charybdis series?

The honest answer is, I don’t know. When I finished The King and Queen of Perfect Normal* I intended it to be the capstone; I didn’t think there was anything else there to explore, and I worried that a prequel would be tedious. The little parts of the story that occur before Charybdis were scattered throughout the first book, and I thought that was enough. I had doubts about my ability to bring a prequel together and not wind up with massive suckage.

It was all buried deep in my head, though. I knew the answers to all the questions I’d gotten over the years. How did Chip get anywhere near the agency as a teenager? How could his mother not know who his father was? How could Kris have been with Ron in the first place—he was a monster…right?

Random picture, I just like it. Carry on.

I had the story. I had far too much of the story, to be honest. If I’d written it all down it would have been a 900 page monstrosity.

But then came training for the SGK 3 Day last year, and when you’re walking mile after mile and you have a writer’s brain, things tend to happen. I can clearly remember where I was when the first paragraph of what would become The Flipside of Here settled into my head; I could see it in front of me. As I hitched up my Camelbak and shuffled down the bike path, the sun in my eyes, I saw the glittering water of the duck pond, I saw two people sitting on a bench, and I just knew.

Through the rest of training for last year’s walk, the story bubbled in my brain; I took notes, I coughed up the details of the things I already knew, and once the walk was over and I began to write the book.

But…now I’m back to where I was before that flash of an opening poked its way through my brain: I don’t know that there’s anything left of the story to tell. I know there’s more there—I could sit down and write another dozen books—but I don’t know if what’s left would be interesting to anyone but myself.

Still, I’ve learned to never say never. I may hit mile 15 of an 18 mile training walk and have another epiphany. Someone might utter a certain phrase and turn it in a certain way, and I’ll just know. I don’t want to declare the series over, yet I also don’t want to make anyone think there’s another book in the works.

I am writing. But at the moment, I am not writing anything that has any of the Charybdis characters in it.

Nope, I’m not bored with them.

I don’t want my readers to be, either.

So…we’ll see.

*Another thing I get: “It should be perfectly normal, not perfect normal!” But no…’perfectly normal’ and ‘perfect normal’ are two different things, and I fully intended the latter.