There was never supposed to be a sequel for my debut novel, The Lightning in the Collied Night.

I approached that book as a one-and-done story. As such, I was okay with the roadblocks I’d set up in it for a sequel, such as the destruction of the Wagamese Wormhole, the banning of time travel, and primarily, the deaths of many of the characters.

But then I realized there was much more of the characters’ stories to tell. And I have to admit, I’d fallen in love with them (most of them, anyway—Irene  Wilkes, not so much). Thus, I wanted to find out more about them. For example, how did Lai (and others) make it from northern Minnesota to Australia after World War III? What happened to Kapono after he arrived in the future? What happened to Anong, Minwaadizi, and everyone else on the Red Lake Nation reservation? Were Lai and Pope Francis II really friends, and if so, how did that happen?

I decided that if I were going to write a sequel, it would have to include (almost) all of the characters from Lightning—all the main characters, for sure. But I wondered how I could do that, since at the end of the book, Kapono was 87 years separated from Lai, Daniel, Katherine et. al. I knew I didn’t want to do two parallel stories from different time periods.

Fortunately, Lightning is a science-fiction novel. And if we know anything about sci-fi, it’s that anything can, and often does, happen. Our only limit is our imaginations … and that pesky science stuff (the first part of science fiction). With that guiding principle in mind, I started outlining the story and characters for a sequel. After a few weeks, I thought I had a workable story.

Then, disaster struck: I realized I’d twisted the story into a temporal paradox with no apparent means of escape. (That can happen with stories that involve time travel.) I was despondent—There goes the sequel, I thought. But then I had an Aha! moment and figured out a route around the paradox. Energized, I started writing chapters … only to run into another paradox that was worse than the first.

After stewing on that setback for a few days, I realized something I’d mentioned briefly in Lightning offered a way out of my paradox box. Was it perfectly clean? Well, no. Was it at least as clean as many other time-travel novels, movies, and TV shows I’d read or seen? I thought it was. So, I kept writing. Ultimately, readers will be the judge as to how well I handled these paradoxes.

As I write this, the sequel has 44 chapters, a two-scene Prologue, a two-scene Epilogue, References, and a Timeline of Events (ala Lightning, but updated). I think it will end up being, within a few pages, about the same length as Lightning. I hope to get the manuscript to my editor by the end of January and self-publish by early June (paperback and e-book).

Over the next few months, I plan on posting some background material about the sequel on my blog, as I did for Lightning. I’ll also probably post a few Flash Fiction stories based on the sequel. I won’t be writing 15 of those as I did for Lightning, because I’m not sure I could come up with that many stories for the sequel—plus the Flash Fictions for Lightning had what I’ll (very generously) call a “limited” readership.

To learn more about the sequel, go to the Sequel option on the main menu above.

P.S. The sequel is the end of the road for Lai, Kapono & Friends. A trilogy is not in the offing.