How did all this come about? Crikey, that's a tough one to answer!

Y'see, writing a book isn't just a case of starting at the beginning and keeping going until you get to the end... It's more like building something out of those little plastic building bricks that I'm not allowed to name for legal reasons: Let's say you want to build a house with your bricks. First, you have a vague idea in your head as to how the house should look. Then you have a look around to see which bricks you've got. Some of the bricks you have will be completely wrong for a house (like wheels or helicopter blades, for example), but nevertheless you gather all the bricks you can get your hands on - even the ones that were way, way under the bed and covered in fluff and teethmarks - and then you start building your house.

Now, if you've ever built something out of those little plastic building bricks, you'll know that there's always a point about half-way-through where you realise that if you did this differently, or left out that and replaced it with something else, the house would be so much better.

That of course means taking apart at least some of the house and starting again. You might even have to do that two or three times.

When you're writing a novel, the characters and ideas and situations are the bricks, and the overall story is the house. See where I'm going with this? Some of the characters and ideas might not work for this particular house, so you set them aside to use later. Or you might suddenly realise that with a little adjustment here and there, one of the ideas - I mean, bricks - will fit perfectly, and do an even better job than you first realised.

There are differences, of course... Writing a novel is more like building a real house out of those tiny bricks, only much, much harder. And another very important difference is that you're not building this house just for yourself: you're building it for everyone to play in. With a book, you can't just write for yourself - you have to think of the readers too. If writers wrote only for themselves, pretty much every book in the world would consist of nothing but a single page with "You know what I mean" written on it.

So: you've built your house and you're happy with it, so now you show it to someone else. And guess what? Since they weren't the person who built it, they can spot things that you can't. Sometimes, these things are as simple as having the wrong colour tiles on the roof, but occasionally more important things show up: "Where are the stairs?", for example, or "This room has no windows!"

The same thing happens with writing: an editor will be able to spot mistakes or areas for improvement. With The Quantum Prophecy, for instance (and now you're thinking "Ah! I was wondering when he'd get around to mentioning the book!"), my editor read the first version of the book and suggested that it should start with more of a bang. Also, he wanted me to introduce a different type of character (I'm not going to go into detail here until the book is released!). He was absolutely right, of course! So now the book opens right in the middle of an exciting battle and then skips ahead a bit. The extra character is introduced in that battle scene: I'd originally planned to introduce that character at the beginning of Book Two, but the more I thought about it, the better it was for that character to appear right from the beginning.

Anyway...

The point of all this - which I need to get to now before I forget - is that to successfully write a book you need to have at least some idea of where the book is going.

With The Quantum Prophecy, I had one very specific idea (again, no mentions of it here: if you really want to know, then buy the book!). It was a good idea, I thought, and I knew that it could be the seed of an interesting story... Y'see, my friends, an idea is not a story, just like a single plastic building brick is not a house. You need to add a lot of other ideas to the first idea to make it into a story.