Todays' guest post is from Vina Jackson, a prolific writing duo responsible for the incredibly successful Eighty Days series......
By the time we delivered EIGHTY DAYS WHITE,
the final volume of the EIGHTY DAYS series, we were both exhausted and run
down, mentally and physically. We had completed five more or less 340 pages
novels in length in under six months!
What had begun as a proposal for just two
volumes, involving flame-haired violinist Summer and conflicted dom and
university professor Dominik had, by acquisition time, grown into three novels
when two publishers fought over the property and one attempted to trump the
other by moving the proffered advance sky high if we committed to writing a
trilogy. Which the other competing publisher soon matched...
At any rate, within a few weeks of the
first instalment, EIGHTY DAYS BLUE, appearing and hitting the Sunday Times Top
10, our hardy literary agent was already fielding frantic requests for us, as
we were still in the process of completing the third volume, to expand the
series to a further two instalments. So, with an eye to our bank statements and
keeping agent and publishers happy -we are ever so obliging- we agreed to write
EIGHTY DAYS AMBER and WHITE, albeit featuring other characters who had made
cameo appearances in the initial trilogy as we felt we couldn't string along
the tortured, on/off/on/off and so on relationship between Summer and Dominik
any further for the sake of our sanity!
All the books continued to be popular with multiple
bestseller lists and supermarket shelves appearances and have since gone on to
be translated into 21 languages, and at one stage we even had four novels in
the German Top 10!
Imagine our sense of emptiness and
anticlimax when this writing madness, spurred on of course by the unforeseen demand
for quality racy romance in the wake of FSOG, finally came to a halt. Days
became long and slow, and we quickly forgot how painful writing the novels had
in fact proven. We'd become addicts/writing machines/constant spinners of
words. Of course, we had to continue.
But we didn't wish to continue flogging a
dead horse, so to speak, and be seen as just a BDSM erotica factory at a time
when the E.L. James wave was finally beginning to ebb. We wanted to do
something new and innovative, while still retaining our 'brand' for rather
stronger sexual moods and quality writing that none of our many rivals could match, according to the majority of reviews.
Thus was MISTRESS OF NIGHT AND DAWN born.
In EIGHTY DAYS WHITE, we introduced a
shadowy organisation called the Network which has a close connection to a
mysterious ball which takes place every year in a different location and offers
a cornucopia of sex and bizarre happenings. We had thoroughly enjoyed writing
all the scenes taking place at the Ball as well as many of the rituals and sex
scenes as spectacle throughout the whole series and decided from an early stage
we wanted to concentrate on that area of our writing and increase its baroque,
phantasmagorical, almost supernatural element. So the Ball became a character
in its own right in our proposed new book, which publishers quickly came
onboard with, understanding perfectly our wish to broaden the attraction of our
novels, without abandoning in any way the erotic elements that had always
attracted us.
We imagined how the Ball came into
existence, which allowed us to scatter 'action' over the course of the narrative
with a series of historical interludes which picture the Ball at play during
the course of the centuries. Then we had to come up with the principal
characters for the novel's major strand, and had to invent the Ball's hierarchy
and rules, with ensuing rebellion against its strictures to power the necessary
conflict and arrived at the central character of the Ball's Mistress.
At which stage the story became to take
off; not so much wrote itself - one of many cliches of the writing trade - but a
tragic prologue dictated the scene and mood, and a baby was born, an heir to
the Ball's power, with a nod to Great Expectations, and our 20 emails back and
forth a day routine resumed, as we quickly began to stray far and away from our
skeletal outline and wander into exciting new directions that just made sense,
and swapped scenes with barely repressed excitement as this longer novel, in
which some of the Eighty Days characters make new and fleeting return
appearances, took flight and dominated our life for a further three months.
The book appears in the UK on September
12th and we hope you like it. As to us, after ensuing breaks in Fiji and the Indian
Ocean, we're already concocting something new; we just can't stop ourselves!
Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vina-Jackson/e/B009CA86G4/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
Buy link for Mistress of Night and Dawn
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