![]() I climbed thousands of steps to get to the top of a Chinese mountain. ![]() For example, Ping’s experience of eating turtle soup was something that happened to me. I’ve been to China, and some of the things that happened to me there ended up in the books. I occasionally use events that happen to me in my life. There really was a Buddhist monk called Fo Tu Deng who travelled from what is now India to China to spread the word of Buddha. The Han emperor Liu Che was, according to the historical records, really obsessed with living a very long life. The destruction of Luoyang that happened before Blood Brothers opened was a real event. I also find inspiration for stories from real historical events. I don’t want to give away any of the story that I’m writing now (who knows, I might completely rewrite it before it’s published!), but I will say that I’m going back to themes way back in the first trilogy. In Shadow Sister, Tao returns to his empty family home and weird things happen. In Blood Brothers, Tao’s family moves to the southern capital. In the second book, Garden of the Purple Dragon, I revisited her family and revealed that things weren’t quite as they’d seemed in Book 1. There are often things that I have mentioned in passing that I can go back to and develop more. In Dragonkeeper, I mentioned Ping’s family and why she was living as a slave. The first place I look for ideas is in the earlier books. So each book is like starting all over again. I didn’t know it was going to be a series! I had the story for the first book and a few ideas left over to start off the second, but nothing more than that. I didn’t know I was going to be writing six books when I started the series. The pain is when I get a really good idea, but I can’t use it because it doesn’t fit with something I’ve already set up in an earlier book. ![]() The pleasure is in starting afresh and making up new stuff, taking themes I’ve touched on before and developing them, thinking up twists and turns. Writing sequels is sometimes a pleasure, sometimes a pain. It’s a challenge to come up with new and, hopefully, original ideas, while still maintaining a sense of returning to a familiar world. This book, as yet untitled, follows on after Blood Brothers and Shadow Sister, and will finish the second trilogy that features Tao as Kai’s human companion. I have started writing Book 6 of the Dragonkeeper series.
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