Week 1 - The Werewolf of Priory Grange

Book 2 Starts Today...

...as does this blog, which is designed to chart the progress of the second book in my Universal Library series (and hopefully to promote the titles as well). Probably most people who read this will have read the first book The Mummy's Quest, but for those who haven't and don't know anything about the series, here's a the brief primer;
The Universal Library (which by the way, is a title I've only just given the series and which might yet change) was inspired by Universal Studios decision to reboot their classic horror films as the Dark Universe Franchise, starting with 2017's The Mummy. (They'd actually intended to start with Dracula Untold but it was so poorly received they decided to reboot the reboot.) I had no problem with the idea of a horror franchise that put all those classic characters in the same world, my problem was an innate certainty that they would screw it up by trying to be Marvel (monsters aren't superheroes) and by trying to create a franchise rather than creating good films and letting a franchise develop from that. So I decided to write my own Dark Universe, integrating the classic monsters into a single world but doing it my way not theirs - which doesn't necessarily mean mine would be better. The books would be horror comedy, because everything I write seems to end up as comedy on some level so why fight it? My plan was to release novels to coincide with Universal's release schedule. But of course The Mummy was derided, then disagreements between studio and directors added a final nail to the coffin of the Dark Universe. Which hasn't changed my plans, it just means that I just have a more flexible release schedule for my books.
The first story, The Mummy's Quest was released in October 2017 and the plan is to write about one every six months, meaning the next is due out in April, and it is the writing of that book that this blog is predominantly about.

I have a list of Universal monsters with story ideas jotted against them, and three of those were in contention to be the subject of the second book, but the werewolf won out and I spent a few months planning the story on paper till I had a rough chapter by chapter break down of the book that will be called The Werewolf of Priory Grange (for those who have read The Mummy's Quest; yes, the Sherlock Holmes references continue). Actual writing started today and I wrote a couple of thousand words this afternoon. Different people write in different ways, personally I like to get through the first draft as quickly as I can, no matter how bad the writing is, with the knowledge that I will go back and fix it later. That said, I have a lot of other work on at the moment (including ghost-writing books for other people) so I can typically just do an afternoon or a morning here and there.

Like I said, I think one of the mistakes the Universal made was trying to create a fully formed franchise - I just don't think that often works. So, although I knew that I wanted The Mummy's Quest to be the first of a series, I didn't and still don't have any over-arching storyline, and I didn't know which characters, if any, would be returning in the next book or those beyond it. Certainly during these early days in the series I'd like the books to be pretty stand-alone so anyone can dip in without worrying about backstory. I had two series in mind as inspirations, the first is probably pretty obvious; Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, which are the high water mark of comic genre writing and a series where you can start with practically any book. The other, less obviously, is the books of P. G. Wodehouse, which are of course some of the best written comic novels of all time, but also exist in their own world - characters from the Blandings series pop up in Jeeves and Wooster and minor characters from Jeeves and Wooster have whole books of their own. The point is, it's not a world in which everyone has to be in every book, it's a world in which characters appear when it is natural for them to do so - which feels like a far more fully realised world.

That seems like enough for a first post. I will try to get one of these out a week as I work, creating an artificial sense of anticipation for the April release.