Between Two Worlds is the first book I’ve released that hasn’t started flushing from my brain at the moment of publication. This is something that happens subconsciously, when you’re not actively thinking about characters and plots and scenes and actions and descriptions and smells and words for nearly every waking hour: everything slowly seeps out.
This can be embarrassing. As your head fills with new characters and plots and etc, someone can ask about an earlier book and you’re struggling to remember anything beyond the title and the premise. “And this Danny Prince is a footballer, you say? I don’t think— oh, that Danny Prince. The one I made up. Oh yes, him.”
With Between Two Worlds there’s a sequel. POC2, as it won’t be called, picks up from the very end of the first book to follow Pod and his friends into the next phase of their adventure. Which means I still have to carry around the characters and plots and etc of POC1.
And, worse/better, I can’t change them. POC1 is done done. It’s out. It’s no longer mine in some sense. It belongs to its millions of readers (I’m manifesting). I have successfully transmitted hallucinations from my brain to readers’ brains via the medium of squiggles, and those squiggled hallucinations are fixed, imprinted in their grey matter. I can only take the story forward and trust that the next drafts won’t reveal a massive flaw in the overall story.
I don’t think this will happen. I wrote the first draft of the full story as a single book, not two, and completed the major rewrites for both books — ironing out the inconsistencies and issues — before I knuckled down on the polishing drafts for book 1.
But there’s always a niggle. Maybe something will occur to me during the next draft of POC2 and my blood will run cold at the implications. Perhaps the beta read will uncover something disastrous.
For now, I’m not considering those possibilities. I’m trying to pretend I don’t have a todo list for POC2 that’ll soon expand to the size of the POC1 list I’ve just reached the end of. That I’ll soon need to finalise POC2’s title and cover, and start to set everything up on Amazon, while also continuing to promote POC1. I also need to think about how to promote POC2 without spoiling POC1.
I still need to actively finish POC2.
For now, maybe I could have a short nap?
A queer coming-of-age dystopian sci-fi adventure with light, shade, and a touch of romance. A story of secrets, lies, found family, and things you don’t know you don’t know.
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Anthony Camber 
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