Guest Post with Adam Dreece of The Yellow Hoods Series

5 things that didn’t happen in book 1 – Along Came a Wolf

When I started writing Along Came a Wolf, I had a couple of ideas that never happened. Note, this does contain some minor spoilers for those that haven’t read book 1. Here they are:

1. It all took place in Europe.

I battled back and forth as to whether or not this story was really taking place in Europe, specifically if Minette was going to be in the Britany province of France.

Deciding to make it a steampunk story complicated matters, because I didn’t want the Victorian elements to make this story Yet Another Victorian Steampunk Story will all the same social idioms, etc. I wanted to have something that was familiar, and yet the history was different than ours. An alternate history world. So, after the half way point, I decided not to make it Europe and to let my imagination go where it did.

2. The Cochon Brothers were to be the bad guys, and LeLoup to be a good guy. The idea for the Cochon brothers were to have the trio be reoccurring villains, and to have LeLoup just a simple character for the one story, however we all know that that changed. What made that happen? The “Went to Market” chapter wrote itself, and so I went back revised the first confrontation scene and allowed it to just go wherever it wanted to go, and thus LeLoup took the role that he did, and the brothers the role they were met for.
3. Elly was black at first. However the more that I got to know her, and the more that I thought about Eorthe (the name of the world), the more questions I had about culture and what not. It felt like I was missing a real opportunity. In addition, the more that I got to know Tee and Elly’s relationship, Elly revealed that there was something different about her, but it wasn’t the colour of her skin (I’ll leave this to the reader to figure out).

My thinking continued and the idea formed for a Moroccan/Spanish type of country, which is where Mounira came from. By the end of book 3, a character stepped forward for book 4 who was black, and told me where it was from and the culture of his lands, etc. I’m very excited to bring Wilbur to the fold.

4. William & Jennifer had a battle scene. When Nikolas comes over to Jennifer & William’s house for dinner, about the middle of the book, they were cleaning up from a battle. It was to reveal that William’s “bad feeling” had indeed been about something. However, the hints that I had in the scene that this had happened felt weird, and Nikolas wouldn’t have ignored them. Instead, I allowed for everything to be cleaned up, but didn’t put the scene in. I plan on revealing what that was about at some point, likely in a Companion Tale. William and Jennifer didn’t just disappear, as some people have commented, I just wasn’t strong enough at the time (in my opinion) to be able to give them their screen time without making the story feel like a “battle family.”
5. It WAS a short story briefly. I stopped writing after LeLoup was beaten (around the middle of the book), thinking the story was over. It was a nice little story, and I’d done what my daughter had asked me to do which was write ‘the Hoods story.’ The next day, as I read through it, something was missing. It felt wrong. I revised things, and they were coming alive and then I arrived the next night at the scene where LeLoup was beaten, I saw him talking to himself. The crazy scene wrote itself and I sat back amazed at it. I really felt like I was there, documenting more than writing what was going on. I was hooked. I needed to write more!