Guest Post: How to Write a Stand-Alone Sequel by Marie Vibbert
Today I have a guest post from Marie Vibbert, author of Galactic Hellcats and the forthcoming Andrei and the Hellcats (among many other publications). I asked Marie to talk a bit about writing a stand-alone sequel for this guest post!
How to Write a Stand-Alone Sequel
My first novel, Galactic Hellcats, was a big hit for the publisher, Vernacular Books. Such a big hit, in fact, that they asked me to write a sequel, which I gleefully agreed to. I’d wanted to write a sequel from the start, had left room in the story for it, and I asked everyone who told me they’d read the book what they wanted to see. “Requited love!” and “Heroic sacrifice!” were the big ones. I made a list.
Because my fans wanted to see some romance for my heroes, I decided to call this work “Galactic Hellcats in Love” and I would have each of the main characters have an arc dealing with love of some sort – romantic, familial, friend-love. Four main characters, four character arcs.
I contrived an outline.
It was… a messy outline. A list of “wants” does not a plot make. I had all these plot threads, laying next to each other like a strung loom. How to weave them?
It started as a joke, “Since it’s supposed to be about love, I’ll write it from the sexbot’s perspective.”
The idea once spoken wouldn’t leave me alone. Andrei was a character I greatly enjoyed writing, though his role in Galactic Hellcats is small. He’s sassy, he’s snarky, he’s flirtatious and irreverent. Best of all, he speaks in snappy one liners, my favorite form of writing.
Andrei started life in a novel I drafted back when I was in high school, though he was a human news reporter then, and he had an appearance as a main character in a failed comic book project my sister and I worked on fresh out of college. He’s always been in my back pocket, as it were. I have, in fact, sold a story with Andrei-the-reporter in it: “Volatile Memory” in Flame Tree’s Detective Thrillers anthology.
Opening up where the first book left Andrei the sex robot, I found myself writing with super-speed, cackling every time I wedged in a cocktail or fashion metaphor. I got the whole draft done in a matter of months. I turned it in; they accepted it, we signed a contract.
And then the publisher went out of business.
Such is the caprice of small press! The rights to Galactic Hellcats and my unpublished sequel were returned to me, and I had to find a place that would buy them. Many places reached out for Hellcats, actually, other small presses that were willing to pick up the pieces of Vernacular’s demise, but none of them wanted the sequel, too.
“You can’t sell a sequel,” one explained to me. “No publisher will accept a sequel, not for a book that was already published somewhere else.”
I loved my wee book, and believed in it, and I am also constitutionally unsuited to self-publish. (I simply can’t trust myself that a book is ready to go live without a relative stranger’s blessing. A relative stranger who owes me nothing. Look, my therapist is talking to me about it. I digress.)
I set out to de-sequel-ize Hellcats in Love to query it on its own.
The first big problem was the opening. I had the book pick up immediately after events in the first book. How to put the reader in the right frame for the action without summarizing an entire book?
I had to introduce all the characters again, in the middle of action, without boring the reader.
It helped to slow down and think, “How would I introduce them if this weren’t a sequel?” I wouldn’t infodump a paragraph about who they are, I’d just give the quick, broad strokes of them through their action and dialog. I moved the start of the book a little earlier, so that Andrei would get to see the hellcats arrive, and our introduction to them is through Andrei’s reactions. “…two ladies stepping out of their flyers, one scampering little imp and one stately, with bright pink Ratanese eye makeup…”
I solicited first readers who had not read the previous book, and urged them to mark and comment on anything that confused them. I even paid a professional editor, who hadn’t read Hellcats, to read the first chapter.
As I revised carefully, I thought I’d stop having to worry about references to the previous book, oh, halfway through, right? But no! I had stuff all the way in the last chapter that called back to the first book, back to the backgrounds of the characters, and I had to go and update those so they made sense in context. Character’s old friends, the place they met, an inside joke. It all needed a little tweak, or in some cases, to be dropped; I could always say “his cousin” instead of a proper name requiring explanation.
I learned that continuing a story is more complicated than it seems. I also found with all these critiques and revision that my plot didn’t work at the end. I tore out the last five chapters and completely re-wrote them. And “Hellcats in Love” didn’t work as a title anymore. The love-arcs were there, yes, but they weren’t the focus. I couldn’t come up with a better working title than Andrei and the Hellcats, which I was sure would be changed immediately upon selling the book to a publisher.
Still, after about two year’s work, I felt I had a solid, stand-alone book, and I started querying agents and publishers with it.
Then Lethe Press contacted me, one of the small presses that had been interested before, offering to take both books off my hands. Their only caveat was: was I attached to the cover art?
No offense, past cover artist, I dropped you like a bad habit and haven’t looked back: Lethe’s covers are GORGEOUS.
I looked at Andrei, though, and wondered about all that work I’d done to make it stand on its own. It was certainly longer, now, but I also felt it was stronger. Should I un-de-serialize it? I stared a long time at my first chapter, pondering.
Did you ever pick up a cool new science fiction paperback from the library only to discover it was book three of four? Yeah, that happened to me a lot as a kid. Now I can say I won’t do that to anyone else.
It was only three years since Vernacular asked me to write a sequel when I signed the contract with Lethe. I know because I checked my records. I had thought it had been something on the order of a decade. Now, at last, a year and a half after the contract, you, the reading public, can experience all the snark and hijinks Andrei puts the Hellcats through! I hope you find the dear boy as amusing as I do.
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Thank you so much, Marie! If you’re interested in Andrei and the Hellcats, it will be out in July from Lethe Press, and you can preorder it now!
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