Thanks for coming by the blog today, Gene! I was so excited to see that you are re-releasing Immortal and have a sequel coming out soon, too. Everyone knows I'm a huge fan of the book - or at least they will when they see me quoted on the back cover now! When you started Immortal did you think you would have other books coming after it?
I don’t think I was thinking of anything special when I started writing Immortal. I was just hoping I could make it to the end. But then I funny thing happened...
See, the first draft of Immortal had a different ending than the one everyone is familiar with. Specifically, some questions that I ended up leaving open were not initially left open. (All right, maybe that was an abuse of the word “specifically.”) But the story didn’t work with all of that information crammed in at the end so in the rewrite I pulled out a lot of expository/revelatory information, and once I did that I knew there was going to have to be at least one more book.
And, since I didn’t use all of that information in Hellenic Immortal, there will have to be at least a third book.
A third book! Exactly what I was hoping you would say. For anyone who doesn't understand how excited this makes me you should probably check out the article I wrote about Immortal over on my sister blog Writing Insight. Gene, you know I love not just talking to you about your books but about how you write your books. I'm hoping to find out how you do it so well! So now I have to ask what is the best part of writing multiple books? What’s the worst part?
The best part is I get to write as Adam some more. As a reader you (I hope) enjoy reading what he has to say, but the pleasure is all mine. I’m hoping he never runs out of things to talk about so I never have to stop writing for him.
The worst part? There are a lot of potential pitfalls. For one thing, since I am writing from a very narrow first person perspective it is very difficult to not repeat myself. Keeping Adam interesting is just in general somewhat challenging at times, because sometimes it seems like he doesn’t have anything new to say about a certain thing. And since he is so fond of throwaway comments about certain people or events, I have to be extremely careful not to contradict myself by, say, putting him in two different historical places at the same time.
What are your plans from here?
I need to write that third book. I’m cramming on the Euro-Asian historical period from the fall of the Roman Empire to about 1450, Celtic mythology, and advanced physics. Hopefully that will give me all I need to flesh something out. Beyond that I have a completed novel called Fixer I’m hoping to roll out next year in time to keep everyone looking for the third Immortal book from forgetting about me while I finish it.
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