I’m participating in the discussion with you on Goodreads about BIGGER THAN A BREAD BOX, so I decided to check out your other books and blog. I’m so glad I did!

Your description of working on the book about Rebecca’s mother is fascinating. I, too, obsess about getting things right even though many readers won’t notice. I’ve been working on a novel with a time slip element. The great grandmother in the story has Alzheimer’s, and I am trying to decide whether to have the slip be real or part of the confusion with time that can be part of the illness. Now that I’m a grandmother myself, time has become such an issue in my life. Anyhow, I loved BIGGER THAN A BREAD BOX and now look forward to reading more of your books.

I’ve had an idea for a sequel to a fantasy novel that I wrote many years ago

When I did this with a story, I found it challenging. Had written one in which a couple were married, with a child. The couple was not the center of the story (the woman’s family was), but I kept wondering after the story was published how they had ever gotten together, because of their different backgrounds, and something the wife thought about her single days kept reverberating. So I set myself the task of writing a story that centered on one night, when they were new lovers, when they could have gone forward, or not–as far as they knew–though I knew that somehow they had to end up the people in the first (in time, the second) story. Oh, and also, the story had to be able to be published on its own, and free-stand. It was an odd experience. I do usually have at least aspects of the ending in mind when I start a story, but of course these are always subject to discovery and change, so I don’t feel constrained. At one point I told myself that if the people in the new story turned out not to be able to get to that future, I could just change their names and call them different characters. (It probably helped to imagine this escape hatch, but since the guy had a particular history that mattered, I really couldn’t do it.) Anyway, I did write the story, and a third, set later. All three (in chronological order, rather than order of writing) are spaced through my collection Magpies (the one you heard me read from, at Sanibel). No one seems to have found any disjunction, but when I’ve explained to book groups and other readers how I wrote them, it’s been hard to explain what a test it was. I have always been obsessed with time, and how we resee experience through time, and I like inventing forms for presenting time, in my stories. (One of the first I published was about a couple who broke up on the night of the time change in Spring, and how different it would have been if the hour hadn’t been lost.) But thinking of it as a relationship between a completed work and another set earlier was a whole new thing. Enjoy the challenge!

I can feel your frustration and joy with what you’re doing, and I think it’s exciting. I think it could yield the kind of reader moments that are amazing priceless astonishing. I experienced this in The Magician’s Nephew and in The Neverending Story and in Asimov’s Foundation/Robot novels. My spine unraveled in these moments. They are precious to me. You very well may be doing that very thing for some reader somewhere.

Mine also has death elements, but I don’t want to give that away just yet…

It’s also a mother/daughter story. The prequel deals with the mother as a girl, but I too wrote the book about the daughter first. The mother actually DIES in the first chapter of the book. Ouch eh?

I found myself thinking about the same things you describe, only no where near your level of clarity and organization. (Yah, my work is probably a hot mess compared to yours. But that’s ok.) I tried to carefully weave the dead mother’s dreams for her daughter through out the book, showing why the main character was making her choices. Our mothers influence every part of our lives, living or dead, whether we want them to or not. In the prequel I tried to show more of who the mother was as a girl and where her desires for her daughter came from. You are right. It’s a beautiful thread that I will probably be the only one to appreciate.

Can’t wait to read 7 Stories Up