imagination

Peeling Back The Layers of Black Hare Valley

~ ChanAtkins ~ 1 Comment

Writing the companion books is revealing secrets and aiding the development of my main book’s characters.

Image by 👀 Mabel Amber, who will one day from Pixabay

It is official.

I am in love with Black Hare Valley.

I have created a universe I am in awe of and addicted to. It has grown and evolved into something far more beautiful and complex than I ever expected, and I am enjoying myself as a writer immensely.

The story has grown from the map me and my son created for fun during lockdown, into what will be a three book series jumping backwards and forwards in time. When my son and I created Black Hare Valley’s physical form, I had no idea what characters would emerge from it, and at that point I had no plot either. I knew I wanted it to be a creepy little town with very dark secrets, and I knew I wanted my main characters to be teenage misfits forced together to try and solve the mystery of a missing boy. But that was it.

Four years later and I cannot believe how it has grown. It seems to have a life of its own right now and I am just along for the ride. Not a day goes by when I don’t come across a secret, a reveal, or an aspect of a character I had not been aware of before. There is a lot of work to do here, but I feel like I am building something very special.

So, what do I mean by peeling back the layers?

When you start to write a book, you usually start with a location, (I had that in great detail) characters, (they started to come to me one by one before I began writing) and a plot. It was the plot I was lacking, but one day I got the first chapter in my head. I knew how the book started. I knew which characters I could introduce by writing these scenes and I knew that as soon as I started writing them, it would take off by itself. And it did.

Once I had those first few chapters and had introduced the main characters, Jesse, Paddy, Jaime, Ralph and Willow, then everything else just flowed. I still didn’t know exactly what was going to happen or why. I knew one of them would go missing and the rest would team up to try and find out why. I knew they would come up against a sinister neighbourhood watch committee made up of the fearsome Sergeant Mayfield, Mayor Margaret Sumner, Vicar Greg Roberts, Head-teacher Edward Bishop, librarian Eugenie Spires and a few more. A few chapters later I knew that my committee of adults in power were very dangerous indeed.

More began to unravel as I wrote the first draft, but even at the end of it, I still didn’t have half of what I do today. I knew the committee were ancient and had been stealing and potentially killing children for centuries in order to preserve their immortality and the town’s, but I didn’t know why or how. That all came much, much later.

With the first, second and even third draft of the first book set in 1996, I had the bare bones. The characters were growing and evolving, the location was spot on, and the how’s and why’s were starting to come together.

Somewhere along the line I began to wonder if these characters own parents had experienced similar things when they were teenagers in the 1960s. At first, I just rewrote some of the scenes with the parents to try and hint that they had also investigated the committee and also grieved a missing child, but of course, once I had that in motion, more and more stories began to rise up. The layers were unpeeling one by one.

These revelations made the 1996 book much better but also set in motion ideas for a smaller, companion book set in 1966. That then made me wonder about 2026… Which of my 1996 characters would still be in the town? What would they remember? While things appear to be solved at the end of book one, are they really?

This was incredibly exciting and led me to where I am now.

Book one (1996) begins on May Day with a child going missing. A group of unlikely teens then band together to try to find the missing boy and in the process reveal dark and dangerous secrets about their beautiful town. They also discover that children have been going missing in Black Hare Valley for a long time. Every thirty years in fact… By the end of the book the group have figured almost everything out, found out what happened to missing Paddy and fought back, to some degree. Everything is calm. They’ve got what they wanted but they still don’t know everything…

Book two (1996) also begins on May Day with another child going missing, this time the May Queen. Her sister, Angie Radley, joins forces with some other teens to try and look for her and in the process they also discover some very strange and frightening things about their town. These teens are directly related to the teens in 1996. Angie Radley is the mother of main character Jesse Archer in 1996. Nicky Archer is Jesse’s father. Lizzie Wilkins is Willow’s mother. Frankie Maxwell is Ralph’s father. Some of these characters are still alive in 1996 but they are not much help to that group of teens… By the end of this book, we have had some reveals and the group have been split up and discouraged from investigating further. There is also a reveal in this book about the character who is the most to blame for the missing children…

Book three (2026) also starts on May Day, and we meet Lila Archer, Jesse Archer’s niece and Nicky Archer’s granddaughter. She’s up to no good and soon involves herself when another child goes missing. Some of our 1996 teens are still alive. Some are not. Some of them remember what happened in ’96 and some do not. But in order to solve the mystery once and for all and put a permanent stop to the committee, they must remember what happened in ’96 and ’66…

That’s where I am right now – with the whole of book three pretty much planned out and just waiting to be written. Once I have done the messy first draft of that I’ll return to editing the first book…

Exciting times!

I have now finished the rough first draft of 1996 and I am almost half way through 2026. I know where I am going and how to get there! It feels amazing…

It really does feel like one basic idea revealed itself to be simply one layer upon a multitude of connections. I am so excited about this series!

My Writing Ban Didn’t Last Long…

~ ChanAtkins ~ 5 Comments

Some months ago I gave myself a writing ban. I had so many projects on the go, all at different stages, plus new ideas invading my mind all the time and I just had to make myself stop.

Juggling multiple writing projects seems to be the way I work. It used to worry me a lot. I used to think it was not a good thing; not for me or my writing. Then I realised that it was all working out, in its own haphazard way. Having a few things running alongside each other doesn’t seem to stop the books getting written or published, so why was I worrying so much?

Image by Theodor Moise from Pixabay

The thing is, I write books quickly. I might get the idea a few years before I get around to starting it, and by then I’ll have all the character bios in place, plus most of the plot and locations, research and so on. But once I start it, once I sit and write the title followed by ‘chapter one’, I am usually on a roll. Three months for a first draft is my average although last year I completed a first draft in seven weeks. That was a particularly addictive book to write!

Now, it might only take me a few months to write a book, but it obviously takes far longer than that to get it ready for publication. Once the first draft is done, there is the second, third, fourth and so on… revisions and editing, sometimes rewriting whole chunks or changing the tense or the perspective. That’s followed by beta reader feedback, yet more edits and revisions and then it’s off to the editor and proofreader…. more edits after that.

By now I’ll be working on blurbs and thinking about front cover designs. All of this takes time… Far more time than it took to write the first draft of the book. Usually, it will take between one and three years for me to publish a book after the first draft has been written.

What tends to happen with me is I can’t not write while my book is with beta readers or the editor. I can’t just sit there and do nothing. There is always another idea waiting for its turn, always another host of noisy characters demanding my attention.

So, while I’m waiting, I’ll write another book…

And eventually they really start to build up!

Image by Leopictures from Pixabay

Hence why I gave myself a writing ban. I was allowed to write flash fiction, poetry, articles and blog posts, but I wasn’t allowed to work on any new books or start writing any of my new ideas. And the reason for the ban was the amount of finished books I was waiting to publish. I don’t want to just churn them out, you see – I want to give each book the launch it deserves and that also takes time.

I had The Day The Earth Turned series ready to go. My plan was to release each book during the season it’s named after, so Book 1: Summer was released in June and Book 2: Autumn will be released in October. In between writing and editing that series, I also finished my sequel to The Mess Of Me, The Mess Of Us and the spin-off book from The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series, At Night We Played In The Road. These two books are part of a bigger universe and are connected to each other and the Holds End Trilogy and Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature. Because of these connections, I then had a new idea for a sort of crossover book, that would pull some of these characters together in one final story, ending their stories and the story of that universe… (You’ve guessed it, that was the addictive, 7-week book!)

I also typed up a zombie apocalypse book I’d started to pen in a notebook… It’s not finished but I wanted to type it up to keep it safe.

For about two years now I’ve also been adding notes/ideas and character bios to a notebook for a future book which will be called The 7th Child. As usual, I can’t ignore what pops into my head about this book, so I have to write things down in the notebook and just recently I ended up writing the first two chapters because, well, they were in my head. I’ve left it there though because although I know exactly what happens in this book, I haven’t quite figured out how to tell the story yet. So, I’m fine to leave this one alone until this becomes clear to me.

Image by 6689062 from Pixabay

My writing ban was now on very shaky ground… And finally, last week, I gave in completely.

Now, to be fair, I am not writing something new. It doesn’t work that way with me anyway. As I’ve already said, I’ll map out ideas, characters and plots for years sometimes before I get enough to start writing the first draft…

But about a year and a half ago I started writing a book called Black Hare Valley. It was another one I’d had in my mind for a few years. It had its own notebook as they always do. It even had a huge, beautiful map my son and I drew together when creating the town. We experienced a two week power-cut because of a storm and during that time I decided to start writing the book in notebooks. I didn’t have much of the plot ironed out, to be honest, but that didn’t seem to matter. It was one of those delicious and exciting books that just wrote itself. I soon had five large notebooks filled with the first draft and the book was out of my head.

Last week I realised that I didn’t really have anything to ‘work on’, other than any articles or poems that were in my head… I felt a bit lost.

I love getting absorbed in my own worlds. It’s what I most love about being a writer. I was missing that pull, missing having one world and its characters dominating my thoughts, following me about all day.

I thought… well, it won’t hurt, will it?

I need to type it up at some point. At least then it will be safely backed up on my laptop…

I’m not writing something new, am I? I’m just typing up…

Of course now I am well and truly lost. I have been sucked into Black Hare Valley just as I was when I wrote it the first time. I love it. I am so, so happy. I think my writing ban was a stupid idea! I might as well keep writing in my usual obsessive way. It’s the only way I’ll get all these books out of my head before I die!

So, the writing ban didn’t hold. And I’m much happier!

Next week I’ll be blogging about something strange I’ve noticed about writing though… It’ll be interesting to see if anyone else has experienced the same thing.

See you then and thanks for reading!

Dear 12 Year-Old Me…

~ ChanAtkins ~ 6 Comments

Dear 12 year-old me,

Image by Piyapong Saydaung from Pixabay

I think about you a lot! I see you in my head sometimes. I don’t think you looked that different to how I do now. Same hair, same face. I don’t think my dress sense has even changed that much. I still remember your crippling shyness, how it crept up on you until you couldn’t deny who you were and how the world saw you. That became a heavy burden in your later teens but right now, it’s not a problem at all. I wish I could go back and tell you that one day you find your voice! That one day you run your own company and write and publish your own books!

It was all you wanted back then. Every day you would rush home from awful school, the place that churned up your guts every night in bed, and you’d glue yourself to your notebooks and pens, scribbling away, pen flying over paper, never stopping. You had so much inside of you, I think it surprised you as much as anyone when you wrote an entire book. Until the moment you created Danny and what would eventually become The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series, it had been short, endearing stories about lost animals.

What happened when you turned 12? Everything.

You discovered music. You couldn’t stand the vapid boy bands popular among your classmates in the early 90s, but you found a lyrical friend in Bob Dylan and other musicians from the 60s. You felt so out of place in your own generation, until you discovered grunge and Nirvana! I remember how you’d lie on the floor with your head between the speakers of your hi-fi system, trying to digest and pinpoint every drum beat, every strum of the guitar, amazed and bewildered by what you were hearing and feeling.

You discovered movies. The Lost Boys inspired you to write about monsters, though you made yours the human kind. I still remember that moment, the bit at the end of the movie where they discover that the head vampire is really Sam and Michael’s mother’s boyfriend and you thought what if that happened in real life? What if your mother was dating an absolute monster and no one knew it but you?

You discovered that your parents had already been divorced for a few years – for some bizarre reason, feeling the need to keep up a charade until the truth came out. What you felt more than anything was relief that the arguing would stop and fear about who they might date. After all, monsters really did exist…

You started writing Danny’s story fuelled by your own fears.

You discovered gritty storytelling. Your writing shifted from cutesy animal tales to hard-hitting ones about abuse, drugs, self-harm, and crime and that’s because you fell in love with The Outsiders and SE Hinton became on of your heroes. She published The Outsiders at aged 17, so that meant you could too, right? Reading her books and others like them, moved you away from animal stories and into darker territory.

You discovered Stephen King and his influence would seep into everything you wrote from then on. The exploration of character and back story and motivation, and the every day details we so often miss. For you, the monsters were always human.

You thought you were fat and so many people thought it their duty to convince you this was true. You began to wish you could shrink inside your own skin, or pull it all off and start again. You looked at your skinny older sisters with envy and longing. You didn’t want to be seen in public with a face like that, a body like that. You turned to your writing, to your characters and they became your entire world, your friends, your everything.

They never went away, let me tell you that now. They are all still here. Every night my mind plays out scenes that have happened or not happened, and every night I watch my own little movies in my head just like you did back then.

I wish I could go back and tell you that everything you hated about yourself then is everything I love about myself now.

You were called over-sensitive, grizzly, weak, easy to make cry. You lived on the edges looking in, observing. I can’t tell you how much that shaped you as a writer and how I wouldn’t go back and change a thing. How now I can see who you were and what you were becoming, that pain is good, that silence makes you stronger, that observation builds entire worlds inside you. That you overcome everything and did it anyway. At 12 years old all you wanted was to be a writer and today that is all I am. That is everything. I smile every day because you gave me these stories, these worlds, these words.

Thank you for doing it. Thank you for dedicating so many hours in your bedroom to writing and creating characters. None of it was wasted. None of it was in vain. It was all worth it in the end.

Thank you for being you.

With love,

44 Year-Old me.

Still Lost In My Own Little World

~ ChanAtkins ~ 5 Comments

Me, aged twelve – thinking about my story at school, staring out of the window, barely listening to the teacher, barely aware of the world around me, filling my rough book with ideas and pieces of dialogue because my characters think the school day is a perfectly appropriate time to start talking to me. Rushing home, backpack bouncing against my shoulders, breathlessly running through the door to complete my chores before the rest of the day is mine. Me, in my room, music on first. Guns ‘N’ Roses at that age, thumping out from my hi-fi music system on the floor. My desk, an old coffee table, me on my knees, hunched over reams of scruffy A4 lined notepaper. A whole folder of one boy’s story, one boy’s scary world which would over time morph into an entire universe of my making.

Me, feeling excited to the point of explosion. Fixating entirely and completely on the story growing before my eyes under the frantic movement of my powerful biro. Pouring out the ideas and scenes that have bombarded me all day at school. Not a part of me is wondering what else I might have missed, from teachers, friends or society itself. Because I am removed and detached from all of that. That’s the background, the white noise, the distraction and this – this is real.

There were always other stories too, a constant stream of words and action. Sometimes I would sit at the breakfast bar in the kitchen with an old transistor radio to keep me company. I’d be lost in there, utterly gone. A ghost in this world but the puppet master of my own. I’d come back when I had to, with drowsy reluctance. What was there for me in this world? Terrible school, awful people, tedious chores and pointless homework. My parents rowing, doors slamming, people leaving, accusations flying, money draining away. I didn’t want any of that. I did not, in the words of Tom Waits, wanna grow up.

So, I didn’t. I broke free. I bucked the trend. Broke the rules. Did what all of them told me not to. I became a writer. And not much has changed. I have a foot in each world but most of my thoughts and dreams happen in my own one. As a child people used to say I was in my own little world and I guess they thought that one day I would grow out of it. Nah. I became a writer.

And it’s just the same now, as I hurtle back from the dreaded school run, a day off stretching ahead of me, dogs to walk, ideas to hold onto. I get to the laptop, get to my stories, to my own little world as fast I can. The world is bigger now – it’s a universe! I have sixteen published titles and eleven of those occur in the same universe. The Boy With The Thorn In His Side was my obsession as a child and a teenager. That story, those characters guided me through my youth and gave me a much needed escape route from reality. No wonder they mean so much to me. No wonder I am reluctant to let go. The Boy With The Thorn In His Side, the Holds End trilogy, The Mess of Me, Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature and Bird People and Other Stories have all grown out of my obsessive writing as a twelve year old. I’d love to go back and tell her! And at the moment, the same universe continues to expand with three more books I am working on side by side. Again, I think twelve year old me would be amazed!

At the moment I am working on the fourth draft of At Night We Played In The Road which is a spin-off book from The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series. Two characters are introduced in book five of the series and I loved them so much I decided to give them their own book. A while back I penned a start to a sequel to The Mess Of Me, which was my debut novel in 2013. I finally finished it recently and as both these new books happen in The Boy With The Thorn In His Side universe, writing them inevitably led me to one final story. A crossover story, which I am currently on the second draft of. This book, The Dark Finds You, brings Danny from The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series, Leon from The Mess Of Me, Bill from the Holds End trilogy and Elliot from Elliot Pies Guide To Human Nature together in one story about a missing boy. It happened naturally and inevitably, I feel, because storylines that run through all those books have tangled my characters up together in the same dark criminal world where youngsters are lured into running drugs for older, criminal gangs and all of this comes to a head in the crossover book. It really finishes off Danny’s story too – from the boy I created aged twelve, to the man he is now – this last story ties everything up with no loose ends left hanging. Once these next three books are released, it really will be the end for that universe.

I will be both happy and sad but other worlds are calling! Plus, I don’t want to drag it out forever! This last book really will tie everything up perfectly and it’s been a very satisfying one to write. I think it is the fastest and easiest book I’ve ever written. It took just six weeks to complete the first draft and it just sort of wrote itself!

So, I’d like to pay homage to my obsessive twelve year old self. Thank goodness you didn’t give up. That goodness that drive to write was there every single day, upon opening your eyes! You didn’t know then what it would lead to but you did know you were addicted!

And I’m extremely happy and grateful to still be lost inside that world of my own making. It’s the best place to be.