Did you know that Lucas drives a black Mercedes S-Class? Or that Snow drives a Lexus?
Did you know that Ian makes breakfast for Lucas at Lucas’s penthouse on Wednesday and Friday, which are also the same days that Mrs. Mason — Lucas’s housekeeper — shows up?
Did you know that Andrei’s parents are named Milos and Sonja and that they were involved in a threesome while on vacation in Las Vegas just two years ago? (Yeah, you’re gonna want to look that one up.)
Did you know that Rowe has three dogs – two Rottweilers and one German Shepherd?
Did you know that Lucas’s couch is white, the duvet in his bedroom is dark red, and the comforter in the spare bedroom is a dark evergreen?
Do you know who is taller than whom?
Most days… I don’t know this information off the top of my head and that can be a problem.
Devil in the Details
I love working on a series. This is my technically my third… er… maybe fourth, depending on how you’re counting. I love spending time with characters, watching them evolve over a series of months and taxing events. I love to see them stumble, fall, make mistakes and learn.
But there’s a drawback… Anything you put in a preceding book has to be remembered for the next book. Trust me, readers remember this stuff! And you never want to take a reader out of a moment because you got an eye color wrong or the fact that you moved the layout of someone’s house around because you simply forgot that the living room is on the left and the dining room is on the right. It’s all about the little details.
It’s become even harder to keep track of these little things now that there’s two of us working on the series. I’m no longer the only person who’s making decisions about the names of businesses, locations, car types, food preferences, towel colors, and such. That’s why Rinda and I are keeping detailed bibles for the Unbreakable Bonds series. (This is going to save us of frustration and heartache later.)
After the rough draft of Shiver was completed and I was making my second official pass of the book, I kept a notebook at hand. Every time a name was mentioned (even if this person never appeared in the scene or spoke a word), or a color was given, or a brand of something was listed (such as a car type), I wrote it down. Every time a place was mentioned, I wrote it down. It’s critical to write down the little details that have a chance of cropping up again.
Rinda and I pass the document back and forth as we edit, keeping it updated when we make changes to the book. This will save us time while working on Shatter. Instead of searching through the book for a reference, we just look at back the series bible.
I haven’t started a new one for Shatter yet. We are still in the rough draft. After we finish the first draft and start the second pass, a new bible will be created for Shatter. Things change. New characters are added and new places are explored. And oh… the chaos we are creating for this new book.
Stay tuned…. We’re hoping to announce an official release date for Shatter very soon.