This is the 11th of 25 blog posts to celebrate my 25th published novel, A Skye Full of Stars. Let me talk through the process of writing a trilogy for The Skye Sisters!
I’d never written a proper series until I began on the Skye Sisters trilogy. Lots of my books are linked, such as the Middledip books, but it always happened more-or-less on whim. Readers enjoyed it when I took a secondary character from one book and gave them a story of their own. And when I wrote Under the Italian Sun, readers and reviewers asked for more on Zia’s best friend, Ursula. So, I wrote An Italian Island Summer to discover what happened to her.
“Readers enjoyed it when I took a secondary character from one book and gave them a story of their own…”
One of the benefits of these linked books is that each book stands alone, as well as being linked to others. My editor was keen that the trilogy would be the same, so readers wouldn’t feel they had to read book one before book or two or that book three wouldn’t make any sense without the others. But they had to work as a series, too – Thea’s story in Under a Summer Skye; Ezzie’s in A Sky Full of Stars; and Valentina’s in Over the Sea to Skye. This book is being edited now ready for publication in early summer.
I’d written about adoption in The Christmas Love Letters and my editor suggested that I do this again, as she liked the way I’d handled it. And it’s certainly a storied subject.
Creating The Skye Sisters…
I realised from the start that I’d have to weave the adoption stories of these three adoptive sisters, Thea, Ezzie and Valentina, in with all the other conflicts and goals I’d normally include in a book. The adoption stories would have to be different to each other – that felt very important.
I gave Thea and Ezz a conflict in common, and I’m not sure I’d choose to do that again. I had to be very careful not only to maintain consistency in that story thread that concerned them both but move it along in A Skye Full of Stars and, to some extent, resolve it again from Ezz’s point of view. Still, it worked out OK in the end. At a couple of points, I wished I could go back to Under a Summer Skye and tweak things to make A Skye Full of Stars easier to write. But that wasn’t possible, as the first book was already on the shelves (or on e-readers).
Writing a trilogy was both easier and harder than writing completely standalone books. I knew Ezzie and Valentina from Thea’s story, which was easy; but I had to keep their stories bubbling through all three books, which was hard. I had various ways to keep the sisters together on the page, even when living apart; but then find a good reason to bring Valentina physically onto Skye when writing Over the Sea to Skye. Two of the books are set in summer, and one in Christmas seeing the same place in a completely different way.
But all in all, I loved writing the Skye Sisters trilogy. I’ll be sad when I have to leave Thea, Ezz and Valentina behind.
