Revelations

Things have been going well with the new series. For example, yesterday I realised that two storylines I thought belonged in different books - one about an abduction and one about a shipwreck - actually weaved together really well in the one book.

Some of the characters are still fluid; I can picture their purpose but not their personality. I originally thought one character - a young boy - could foretell the future, but at some I realised that I was actually thinking of another person entirely, and I discovered that the little boy was actually a healer.

Revelations like these take me by surprise because I don't know where they come from.

Sometimes I worry that there are too many people in these stories. There are really only a few main characters but then there are lots of minor characters and even more incidental ones. There are some characters who are only minor in themselves but who play important functions in terms of the plot. And there are some who are only mentioned in early stories but who become crucial later on.

It worries me because in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, there are quite a few characters introduced in the first novel - the main characters, their high school friends and families etc. Some of these fade from importance in the second book and aren't replaced until the third book, when the werewolves become prominent. And then suddenly halfway through the fourth book there are vampires, vampires everywhere! It's so difficult to remember who's who that Meyer lists the covens at the end of the book.

I don't want to put my readers in a situation where they read a name and can't put a face to it. I want them to know everybody. Which means I need to limit the numbers of characters as best I can and properly introduce all the necessary ones, so when they reappear somewhere, the readers don't say 'um, who's this?' but 'yay, so-and-so's back!'