IT’S official: the sequel to Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia is on hold for a while. I’ve been having a lot of trouble writing it and I’ve been putting the blame for that on the disruptions generated by our recent house move, but after sitting back and doing some soul-searching I finally realised the truth: I wasn’t happy with the story I’d developed. Let me qualify that a little bit. I was, and still am, enthusiastic about the story’s Big Picture. The problem is in the details—the subplots and the “flow” of the story as a whole. I can’t explain how it went wrong—possibly that house move thing was part of it, possibly not—but the upshot is that the timeline needs some serious rethinking before I write another word. Seriously, I don’t even want to look at the current timeline in case it pollutes my thinking. So I’m going to start over from clean. But that’s not going to happen right away. I need time away from the project so I can order my thoughts. In the meantime I’m working on something else.
A couple of years ago I wrote a full-length story with a working title of The Artemisia Chronicle. It got put to one side when I started focussing on editing Gunn & Bohemia, and then after G&B was published I got pretty much straight into thinking about the sequel, so my other projects stayed on the shelf. Now that I’ve decided to mothball Gunn & Bohemia II for a bit, this story has been dusted off and is back in play. Today I finished reconstructing its timeline by skimming every scene and summarising it in a spreadsheet. The next step will be to review that timeline and fix a handful of problems (for example, there are a couple of early scenes that happen impossibly close together in time). Once that’s straightened out I have some work to do to fix a subplot that doesn’t really do anything, and then the ending needs some work to give it a bit more cowbell.
Once I’m happy with that timeline I’ll be editing every scene. In some cases that might mean a complete rewrite; there will almost certainly be new scenes needed, and it’s more than likely that certain scenes will be trashed. That’s the way these things go. The end result will be a shiny new story, ready to be submitted to my publisher. And because it’s already been written once, it won’t take a very long time to write it again. Depending on the publisher’s schedule it might even be on shelves before the end of the year.
Watch this space.
Pete Ford 