I was surprised to see that my last update on my progress on the planning of my Guardians of Hades series was two weeks ago. It just goes to show how caught up I am in planning the paranormal romance series and how much work it is that it’s keeping me busy practically every hours of my working day at the moment.
It’s an epic series to get into order but I’ve made fantastic progress on it over the past couple of weeks and I’ve now reached the point where I’m close to planning and writing the outline of the first book in the series, which belongs to the second eldest brother.
I’ve spent a lot of time each day working on this series. I’ve been getting the world into order and finalising some of the details about it, as well as the characters. I’ve focused mostly on the brothers and the first heroine for now, with more basic bios in place for the other heroines in the this monumental seven novel series. I’ve also been thinking about the enemy a lot and writing up bios for secondary characters like Hades and Persephone. They’ll be playing their part throughout the series, so it’s important I have a character reference type sheet for them.
There’s been a lot of research happening these past couple of weeks too. Greek mythology has always fascinated me since I was young, a little like vampires have and dragons too. I know a lot about Greek mythology and the gods and goddesses, but it’s been fun to learn about the lesser known deities like Nyx (she’s more like a primordial deity – like an embodiment of something) and her children (like Thanatos, god of death, and Hypnos, god of dreams / sleep) and the twelve Olympians (of which Hades was not one, poor bloke… no wonder he has a problem with his younger brothers!) and the Titanomachy (that big war where Zeus, Poseidon and Hades decided to attempt to kill their parents and threw the Titans off their thrones and seized power). I actually spent a few days with the word ‘Titanomachy’ stuck in my head.
I’ve really enjoyed getting this series into order and working on the characters and refreshing my memory. You have to remember that I’ve been working on this series since 2008, so there’s a slew of conflicting ideas as the years progressed, stuff that I clearly thought was a great idea as I repeated it in several different ways throughout my notes, and lots of parts where I leap around trying to decide who would make the best enemy! Needless to say, there are bits I’ve tossed in the trash, and ideas I’ve given more importance to, and characters who have departed, replaced by new, bigger, badder characters.
The hardest part has been constantly reminding myself that all I need right now is a clear idea of the overall plot that links the individual novels and forms the series arc, the main characters who will feature in book one, knowledge of who the enemy is and the other characters who’ll appear in later books, and stuff about the world. It’s been hard. My writer mind wants everything figured out right now in infinite detail. I don’t normally write series that have a particular story arc flowing through all of the books. I tend to write about worlds instead, using that to link each book.
Today, I’ve been busy ironing out a few more details, writing a list of things that happen in each book – either stuff that gets revealed / explained or major events that drive the series forwards – and drawing floor plans for two of the buildings featured in the series and writing about them. I always do this with buildings I know are going to appear more than once. It’s much easier than accidentally contradicting myself in book 3 or having to dig through each book for the descriptions before I can write about that place again. Believe me, it’s worth doing this before writing a book. It makes it so much easier when you just have to reference your floor plan and the sheet you’d written about that apartment, building, etc and you can keep adding to the sheet if you decide to include something new or change something.
But that’s enough of the inner workings of my writer mind. I need to get back to writing rough character arcs for the other six brothers so I know where they are in book 1 and where they’re kind of heading.
Hope you’re all still liking the sound of the series!
