I am running into an interesting, and heretofore unknown to me, problem in writing Tourbillon. The book has a definite voice, which follows on the voices of Mainspring [ Powell's | Amazon thb | Audible ] and Escapement [ Powell's | Amazon ] (I should hope!). It’s a voice I like, and I’m fairly comfortable with. The challenges of this book are not rooted in its narrative voice, after all, which like the setting is well-established.

But Fred, the little man inside my head, keeps whispering seductive suggestions to me about doing cool, different things with voice. This book is not the place to experiment with voice, damn it. I’m tempted, but I’m not foolish. I’ve also never run into this particular problem before. Probably because I’ve never written a book 3 before.

Mostly what this tells me is that the next time I write a trilogy (or at least do so on purpose), I should probably write the whole thing in more or less one extended sitting. Since I expect to write two different trilogies in the next several years, that’s advice I plan to take to heart.

It also tells me that when I come back to the Mainspring universe somewhere down the road, outside the context of this narrative cycle, pick a different voice in which to tell the story. How do you multi-volume types keep the consistency, I wonder?

Originally published at jlake.com. You can comment here or there.