For a little while at least, I'm back to work on a book with the working title "Two For Keeps". This is the sequel to One Juror Down, my July 12th release. I had written the first two chapters a while back before getting re-buried in my day job at the time. Now that One Juror Down has been through the first edits and I'm refamiliarized with the story I'm back to the sequel. I did a lot of work on the first chapter on Friday and it left me thinking about who the bad guys should be.
   I like a complicated plot, one where there are multiple sets of bad guys and they intertwine in and out of the action to where I'm not always sure "who done it" until close to the end. That's exactly what I have in this story as well. I know what my intentions were when I started writing back when, but now I'm not sure if I agree with myself.
   When it's a sequel, how important should the bad guys from the first book be? Does it create more of an arc to have the bad guys not receive their final comeupance until, say, the third book, or is it more interesting to have a new big bad?
   I just read the second book of Jennifer St. Giles Andrews sisters trilogy, and in that, nearly everything you thought was solved in book one turned out not to be, so the mysteries had to be re-resolved in book two as the stakes were raised. An interesting approach! Won't work for me, but it didn't make the second book any less interesting to solve the same mystery again.
   So, instead of writing fresh pages, I'm going to actually sit down and try to plot. Sometimes I do this, sometimes I don't, but I'm finding it's more important in a sequel, since there is so much you can't change due to the first book's events being set in paper!

 

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