Sunday, June 24, 2012

The Next Story

Since last we’ve blogged, we’ve been working on the sequel to our first novel, Bobbie Titan in the Mark of Kain. It’s now just about ready for the professional editor. And the exercise of reading through the manuscript after putting it aside for half a year has renewed our faith in our ability to tell a story. It’s entitled Bobbie Titan in the Alternate Way and it is even more fun than our original collaboration.

We think sometimes authors are too timid with sequels. When the readers like what they did the first time, some writers are afraid to take chances with the second book. The early drafts of this book were that way. Luckily, we decided that we owed it to ourselves and to our faithful followers not to get too cozy with the original narrative and we decided to take some chances. We’re not sure the story would have ended up the way it did if we were writing it under contract with a traditional publishing house.

Maybe it’s a little too daring, but we don’t think so. There were some important social commentaries we wanted to sneak inside a teen adventure novel and to do that we needed Bobbie to explore areas many young adult novels stay away from. So, even though this book wanders further into science fiction, we think that what happens inside Bobbie’s head and heart is closer to what happens to many teenagers as they begin to tackle what it means to become an adult.

Now comes the tedious part. We need to make sure all of the pieces are in the right place and send it off to the editor. When we get it back we will have to read through each comment and make sure any changes are reflected consistently thoughout the entire manuscript. Then comes the final editorial proof, our final edit, creating the cover, writing descriptive paragraphs, updating our author biographies, and getting all this to our publishing agent. After that comes your chance to read the new Bobbie Titan and to let us know if we made the right decisions regarding our fictional heroine and if you like where the story is going.

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