I’m missing you already.

Welcome back to another blog hop, with #OpenBook. Here’s this week’s prompt.

Don’t forget to click the purple button to see what everyone else has to say on this week’s subject. It’s at the end of my post.

Do you miss a WIP when you’ve finished writing it?

The simple answer is yes.

Often, I don’t get the chance because as soon as I’ve typed The End, I’ll start to get ideas for a sequel. Or, if a character that I particularly liked has been killed, I might see a prequel or spin-off idea that involves them. Almost as if they’re reluctant to disappear forever without telling me more.

I suppose it’s not surprising. The work that I’ve just finished has occupied my mind for months, maybe longer since I first saw it. I’ve lived and worked with the characters, seen inside their lives and felt their emotions. I might not have had any control over what they got up to, but even as a passive observer, I’ve been a part of their world.

I guess that whoever is sending me the information sees it as a waste to not use everything that I’ve already seen in some other project. It makes sense, once you’ve gone to all the trouble of creating a universe, it would be silly not to.

Not only that, several of the series I’ve been involved in have actually had sequels written at the same time, without a break. For example, I completed Andorra Pett and the Oort Cloud Café and just kept writing about Andorra’s adventures. Andorra Pett on Mars was the result. It was the same with Ribbonworld and Jungle Green. The end of one and the start of the next was just a convenient pause in the telling of a larger tale.

I currently have about eight sequels in various stages, so I never really get to miss those characters and their worlds either. As I see new bits, I add them in. It’s all very random, there are some that I’ve been working on for several years, as nobody has ever read the first novel and asked for the next book, they don’t really have a high priority.

Anyway, the way that I work means that I have to wait to see what’s going on in my head before I can write it down. This means that every novel’s completion is at the mercy of the characters.

Strangely, they can be as disinterested as the readers when it comes to telling me what happens next. I might get a whole lot of information about one and, just when I think I’m getting somewhere, it all stops. Then another one starts up.

One day, they’ll all be finished, maybe.

Until next time.

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