We’re very excited today to welcome Genevieve Cogman back to the Hive!

To celebrate the release of ELUSIVE, the sequel to Scarlet, Genevieve joins us to tell us about her writing process for her brand new series. Before we find out what she has to say, let’s find out more about Elusive:

Revolutionary France is full of blood and bite . . .

1793. Eleanor, once a lowly English maid, is now a member of the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel: renowned for their daring deeds, and for rescuing aristocrats and vampires from the guillotine. When the notorious French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand goes missing, Eleanor and the League leap into action. But they uncover two vampire factions feuding for control over humanity’s fate. Talleyrand’s disappearance is part of a larger, more dangerous scheme – one that threatens to throw France into bloody chaos . . .

As the mutiny continues, a once-dead queen stalks the streets of Paris and the Scarlet Pimpernel is nowhere to be found. Eleanor must take control of her own fate. If she doesn’t, she may find herself the victim of the very people she came to save.

The thrilling follow-up to Scarlet, Elusive by Genevieve Cogman is a witty, inventive retelling of the Scarlet Pimpernel, perfect for fans of The Invisible Library series, Kim Newman and Gail Carriger.

Elusive is out today! You can order your copy from:

PanMacmillan | Bookshop.org | Waterstones

SEQUELS AND SUPERNATURAL WORLD-BUILDING

by Genevieve Cogman

There are some authors who lay out the entire plot of a book, trilogy or series before beginning to write, detailing character idiosyncrasies and eye colour and taste in coffee, and outlining the “natural/supernatural laws” of their universe in full detail. This is, in fact, incredibly useful if you need a “series bible” which can be shared with other people, and if I ever get to that point in future, I will have to change my ways.

However, at the moment I am not one of them. I’m somewhere between a “plotter” and a “pantser”: I have an outline, and I know some character details, but there are various plot holes in my outline with a metaphorical sticky yellow note on them saying “and at this point by some method I have not yet established, our heroes escape”, or similar “work this out when I get there” comments. I’m also very subject to Lois McMaster Bujold’s comment that “The author should always reserve the right to have a better idea”. Because, for me, it’s simply a fact that I frequently have better ideas later on in my work than I did when beginning it.

So it will not surprise you that when I reached book two (and book three) of the Scarlet Revolution trilogy, I found myself having to work out further details of plot and worldbuilding – and also, I had to handle the potholes which I’d left behind for myself while writing book one. For instance, just how precisely did vampire control of humans work? How long a process was it to implement, how much vampire blood did it require, did it lapse once the human had been left without vampire blood for too long a period, how did the controlled human being react when presented with facts which were outright contradictory to what his controller had told him, and so on. These are the sorts of things which can complicate the writer’s life; when dealing with plot questions such as “so why don’t the vampires immediately exert their control over the imprisoned heroes”, the answer has to be both plausible in terms of character interaction and luck, and also has to agree with what the author has previously stated as “rules” for the setting.

The author does have a bit of leeway in terms of “the unreliable narrator”, where person X told the protagonist Y about how vampires behave, but X’s understanding or knowledge was flawed, or X was lying. However, using this get-out-of-jail card too many times can shake the reader’s own suspension of disbelief when reading the story. (Also, one then has to justify why person X was incorrect or lying, which can create its own set of problems. Though occasionally it also provides new plot material. Sometimes the rabbit hole does have something useful at the end.)

I admit that my approach to this is influenced by the fact that I’ve done freelance writing for various roleplaying games (Exalted, Orpheus, In Nomine, GURPS Vorkosigan and others) and I have some experience with thinking of supernatural powers in terms of game balance – and in what might utterly derail a campaign, or story. I’m also used to running games, and I know that players will seize on little titbits of information about their powers and then use them in ways which were never previously expected. (“So I can possess machinery? All right, a grenade’s a machine, isn’t it? I possess the grenades in his ammunition belt, pull all their pins, and escape while he’s distracted . . .”) Declaring that vampire – or mage – powers are particularly open-ended or wide in their usage can create problems when writing the next book in the series, as you then have to establish why the protagonist can’t use their power in a particular way to avoid a trap, defuse a situation, or otherwise spoil a nicely dangerous climax.

There’s also the retrospective aspect of “if the supernatural creatures could do this, then why haven’t they already used this power to achieve some obviously useful goal?” Looking back in history, if vampires could conveniently control people and turn them into unwitting slaves, then why might vampires have allowed certain events to take place? If they have such irresistible tendrils of control exerted through society, then how could they ever have been, for example, driven out of France or dragged to guillotines?

The answer to these questions can be very interesting in terms of establishing the background; in a way, formulating the question helps the author establish more about the setting while working out what the answer is. There may be multiple possible reasons why the vampire powers don’t work in given situations – perhaps they have unambiguous counters, or they’re obvious under certain circumstances, or the person on question was inaccessible. Or, and this is the sort of answer which provides a whole new level of juicy plot, it’s because there’s another vampire faction out there who’s deliberately protecting the vampire-hunters and the common citizens of France . . . in order to seize power themselves once the land is theoretically free of sanguinocrats.

These may all seem rather mechanistic questions, establishing “rules” rather than exploring character depth or plot themes. But – in adventurous thrillers, at least – I think the author has to lay down these rules for the reader to feel an appropriate sense of tension. For there to be something at stake, there has to be a clear understanding of what is possible and what is impossible for the heroes and villains to do. And for the reader to understand that, the author has to establish it first.

Later books in a trilogy – or a series – have to either raise the stakes or deal with a completely different area. The author can’t retread exactly the same ground, or have the protagonist trying to resolve something which they themselves consider trivial and unimportant when compared to prior events. The scope widens, broadens, deepens – and as a result of this, the author has to immerse themselves in worldbuilding which they were able to ignore earlier. They now have to figure out exactly how magic works, or what the secret vampire history is, or who is responsible for everything that’s been happening for the last seventeen hundred years . . . and do it in such a way that it doesn’t contradict book 1, but also provides a satisfactory resolution in book 3.

But on the positive side, while it may involve a lot of thought, research, and banging one’s head against the computer screen, it can also be very rewarding when it all clicks into place. It’s like fitting a key piece into a jigsaw. Suddenly the uncertain ground of conjecture becomes solid structure, expanding the plot’s themes and the characters’ growth, and the story has a sense of both complexity and reality which it didn’t have before.

Elusive is out today! You can order your copy from:

PanMacmillan | Bookshop.org | Waterstones