Last week, I had the fun of finally meeting in person my fellow writer and History Hoydens contributor Lauren Willig. Lauren was in California as part of a book tour for her novel The Seduction of the Crimson Rose. If you haven’t already discovered Lauren’s Pink Carnation books, do so now. They’re a wonderful Napoleonic Wars spy series, filled with adventure, intrigue, romance, playful allusions to The Scarlet Pimpernel, and an equally fun modern-day frame about a contemporary graduate student who is uncovering the history of the Pink Carnation while researching her dissertation in London. I was so excited to have a new book in the series to read, and it was a special treat to get to meet Lauren in person.
Lauren and I had a great time talking about writing and research and the joys and challenges of writing a series. The Seduction of the Crimson Rose features two characters who had woven in and out of the earlier books in the series. Neither, Lauren told me, was originally intended to get a book of their own, but as she wrote the series she realized they were calling out for one. (As a reader of the series, I second that–I’m very excited to read about Vaughn and Mary!). I think that is inevitable in writing a series. No matter how carefully one plots things out, characters change and develop, new characters emerge, and the carefully thought out story can shift. While there are overarching plot and character developments for Charles and Mélanie and other characters that have stayed the same in my mind from the start, new characters I hadn’t even dreamed of when I was first writing Daughter of the Game/Secrets of a Lady have grown to take on significant roles in the series, and existing characters have shifted somewhat to demand different plot developments. As I mentioned in last week’s post, I originally had no intention of giving Raoul O’Roarke his own love story. But Raoul and the lady in question found each other and quite interfered with the love story I had planned for someone else.
As a reader, one of the things I love about a series is speculating on what will happen next. Lauren mentioned that readers write to her with all sorts of fascinating ideas about what might happen, who might fall in love with whom, what direction the story might take. I certainly do that when I read a series. Maddening as the wait was between the books in Dorothy Dunnett’s House of Niccolò series, it was so much fun to speculate between books, to reread for clues and construct elaborate theories. My friend and fellow writer Penelope Williamson and I spent hours discussing and debating the Niccolò books over lattes and on listservs (where we also made a number of wonderful friends). We do the same thing with favorite television series–we used to spend hours debating Alias and earlier this week we were speculating over Lost. I used to do the same with The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
In the comments on last week’s post about ex-lovers in books, Sharon mentioned “How likely is it for one to become close friends with the former lover of one’s spouse? From what I’ve read so far, I can’t imagine Charles ever being so close to Raoul as Rafe is to Robin, or as Beth is to Blanche.” I was very intrigued by the idea that readers might think about what would happen to and between my characters in future books, much as I do with series I love. It’s particularly interesting as I’m currently in the early stages of working on the fourth book in the series. So I thought would ask–are there any particular things (plot twists, revelations, character development) you think will happen with Charles, Mélanie, and the other characters as the series progresses? Any developments you’d particularly like to see occur, whether or not you think they’re likely to happen? How do you think Charles and Raoul’s relationship might play out? (Bearing in mind that the demands of the plot and of their circumstances won’t allow them to ignore each other). Will Mélanie be able to keep her secret? If not, what might happen to her and Charles and their friends? (JMM had some interesting thoughts on this as regards to David in the comments on a recent post). What about Jeremy Roth and his relationship with the Frasers? Gisèle and Andrew? The Elsinore League? Which characters would you like to see more of or learn more about? And much as I love talking about my own characters :-), do feel free to talk and speculate about other series as well!
In honor of being just past Valentine’s Day, this week’s addition to the Fraser Correspondence is a letter Mélanie writes to Charles (but never shows to him) on their first visit to Scotland, when she has made the disturbing discovery of how much he has come to mean to her.
Tracy Grant - Novelist 
February 27, 2008 at 7:17 am
There are a couple of questions on Mélanie & Charles that I have wondered for some time. I hesitate mentioning them because it seems somewhat inappropriate. And quite odd, too, considering that I’ve only read the first book in a series that I sincerely hope to be a long running one.
Let me state first that I hope Mélanie & Charles live long and healthy lives. Together. But I have wondered which one of them would die first and what the death of one of them would do to the other. Would it be Charles to go first, leaving Mélanie once again with no one to confide in? (Isn’t that what it was like for her after she began to pull away from Raoul and before the start of “Secrets of a Lady”?) Or would it be Charles nursing Mélanie to her last breath? How would the surviving spouse cope with the loss? Further, would the children ever learn of their parents’ secrets? Would it be before both of them are gone or after one of them is gone? How would the truth affect them?
So I can’t hold these questions in after all. 🙂 I hope you don’t mind.
February 27, 2008 at 8:04 am
Wow, Sharon, great questions! I don’t mind at all. These are exactly the sort of questions I love to explore.
In my mind, they certainly live long, healthy lives together. I’ve never really considered which of them might die first. In my mind, they sort of go on forever, like Sherlock Holmes :-). But as I mentioned in my “What if…?” post above, I sometimes speculate about alternate scenarios for my characters that I’d never write. When I was writing “Secrets of a Lady,” I imagined how events would play out with Mélanie dying at the end, though I absolutely knew I wouldn’t write the book that way. (I did, very early on in planning the book, consider having her almost die in the denouement with Charles by her bedside saying “Don’t you dare die on me.”) If Charles lost Mélanie while he was still relatively young, I think he’d retreat inward, focus on his children and politics, spend time with his close friends but withdraw a bit from the world at large (the world Mélanie pulls him in to). I doubt he’d marry again. I’m not even sure he’d take a mistress. Mélanie, I think, would stay outwardly more engaged with the world, though she’d retreat as well inside. She’d focus on the children too, and on the causes she and Charles believe in (in fact I think both Mélanie and Charles would react to each other’s loss by trying to live up to the other’s image of them, if that makes sense). I doubt Mélanie would marry again either, unless she needed to for pragmatic reasons (for instance, she’d be quite capable of doing so to protect her children). I think she’d be much more likely than Charles to take a lover, though. Or more than one, because that would make it easier to keep herself emotionally detached.
Colin and Jesica learning their parents’ secrets is something I think I will explore in the series (which means they’ll learn the truth when both their parents are still very much alive :-). I have a vague idea about a book quite a bit farther into the series with Colin as a student at the University of Paris at the time of the 1832 uprising (the “Les Miserables” era). He’d be eighteen/nineteen and Jessica would be fifteen/sixteen. I could see Colin getting caught up in the uprising, Raoul perhaps being somewhere on the periphery, Charles and Mélanie having to go to Paris to extricate their son. Colin and Jessica might learn the truth then. Or they might learn at least some of it much earlier. I haven’t quite decided how much of the truth will come out in the more immediate future and to whom. I do know that I want to deal with Charles and Mélanie’s friends David and Simon (who play an important role in “Beneath a Silent Moon”) learning the truth. David (an earl’s son who takes his heritage seriously for all his liberal principles) is, I think, going to have a much more difficult time with it than Simon. Which will lead to some very interesting dynamics
How Colin and Jessica will be affected by the truth is something I still have to explore (it will have a lot to do with how old they are and the circumstances under which they learn it). Oh, and I don’t expect Colin and Jessica will be the only children Charles and Mélanie will have :-).
February 29, 2008 at 5:00 am
These are excellent news to me. Not only do I get to see Colin as a young man in a future book, I am also assured of Mélanie & Charles’ imortality, which now frees me to plot their deaths whenever I wish. 🙂 When it is Mélanie I imagine dying first, no matter what the cause is, in my mind’s eye I would always see Charles by her side, holding her hands while she draws her last breath. However, when it is Charles I imagine dying first, I couldn’t see him dying at all. He would simply have gone, and the picture I have is of Mélanie alone, either by herself or in a crowd, remembering or being reminded of their past adventures. It’s strange, I suppose, but somehow I just couldn’t see them dying together or dying the same way.
February 29, 2008 at 8:43 am
Glad you like the idea of a book about Colin as a young man, Sharon! (Though it will be a ways in the future; too many stories I want to tell first). And I’m glad you feel able to imagine your own images of Charles and Mélanie well in the future–that’s what I was getting at with the “What if…?” question. I think it’s really cool when readers imagine alternate futures for characters in books or alternate endings to the books themselves. I had dinner with friends tonight, and their twelve-year-old daughter asked if I ever imagined books ending differently, I said, “All the time. Do you?” She said she did, and she often stayed awake imagining different ways books could end. I told her that’s just what I did when I was her age, and what I’ve been doing ever since.
I think your alternative scenarios for Charles and Mélanie really fit the characters. Charles is much more grounded in the every day details of life, much more likely to be found in the solidity of their home. Mélanie seems to be me more likely to be found interacting with the world, engaged with a project, yet at the same time very much alone.
May 17, 2009 at 7:33 am
[…] blogged a while back about the delights of speculating over a series. Part of it of course is trying to unravel the plot. When I was a teenager, my mom and I had […]