I am starting to walk this Lucks Hill Riders series forward again. Processing the large amount of multi book, multi series feed back is happening when it will  – and how it will  – and then I usually have to walk away or I get swamped by it. A straight forward path it is not.

I often start with questioning myself – ‘ what were you doing with this when you wrote it?’ rather than ‘what did this grow into needing to be?’ 

A case in point is the last written prequel and when I thought about this I realised it was written in answer to a specific set of requirements and that I did not, now, have to follow those and in fact I can make two stories out of the one which adds to the little pile of stuff I can offer in advance of selling any of the main books.

I had thought of a title ‘Last Chance’. And I stalled because the flip side of that – while it may be perfectly good as a title for this story – because it actually defeats me as my brain tells me it is MY last chance to get this done. So I have adopted the working title of ‘It Begins: Benji’s Story’. This has more of an affirmative effect on my mind set 🙂

I had set up the digital files last week and this week I peeled out the hard copy into a file. And I also looked at the set up in my Whole Story World Bible and made up a file divider header book page for it. Makes it seem more real.

My head then starts to suggest may be I could fundamentally change the structure of the series time line and that these two stories could be set the year before… Luckily my series bible helped me take an eagle eye view of that and also reminded me that research on line can be awkward when a Google question provided a wrong answer – luckily I have a good memory and I had already had that result before and had left my self a note – didn’t solve the plot question but I knew I wasn’t going to make a total deviation I would regret later when the truth of that date came to mind again. I have not yet made a decision on the point in question and I have put it away to let my head mull it over while I do other things.  I have learnt to let go and get out of my own way or I will wheel spin on this until my head aches and I hate the story.

I think it is the guy who writes Game of Thrones who calls little changes ‘the butterfly effect’ and I am mindful of it and I suspect that the story will remain in the 12 months it is now as several issues have already floated up about it but I have to let my brain think about it quietly to see if anything else is there I am not aware of.

The warm dry weather is helping me get out and about and keep me cheerfully occupied 🙂