I said I’d never never do it again. Why have an entire trilogy no one wants to represent, I said. Why spin my wheels, I asked. It’s wasting time. It does no one any good. It just makes me sad…. I said all this, I know.
And you know what? It’s complete bollocks.
I like the worlds I’ve created. I’m proud of them. My writing group and my family want to read more stories about these worlds and these characters. I’ve got tons of notes and even a first draft. I’m writing a sequel.
The third book in a trilogy, actually. Many moons ago, I wrote a book called Paladins of the Storm Lord. It’s about a spaceship crew who gets thrown off course, develops super-human abilities and decides to be gods over the colonists they’re transporting. The bulk of it takes place on the colonists’ planet 250 years later when an epic catastrophe of the gods’ doing makes people begin to question their faith.
A couple years after I wrote Paladins and rewrote it….and rewrote it again, I wrote The Third Level, a sequel that I liked even better than the first. By then I knew these characters and what they were capable of. I enjoyed pushing them, mutating them and making them grow. Last year, for my nano, I wrote the rough draft of the third in my trilogy and now I’m fleshing it out, something I swore I wouldn’t do again.
So why now? Well, besides novel love, there’s also the hope that comes with e-books. If no publisher ever expresses an interest in these three books, even if another one of my books gets published, I can release these on my own, just to see them out there. That makes me happy and puts to bed those “spinning-my wheels” feelings.
^_^
Have you written a sequel? Do you ever plan to even if no one seems interested in Book 1? Would you ever write one if your beta readers wanted to know what happens next?
