'I want to make sure that all the characters get their stories dealt with, their stories addressed - including the girls at the very beginning who were cruel to Candy in the first place - they also have a place. Meet yourself as a baby or as an old person or whatever, so there's a lot of interesting stuff happening there.' Given the fact that it is a time out of time, what revelations, what horrors, what wonders are you going to see when you Long knives in the second book and a bunch of characters bit the dust, there's a bunch of new characters waiting in theĬlear about what Book 4 will be yet because there are some things in play that I have to work through which are actuallyĪbout the metaphysics of it all actually they are about what happens when you get into the 25th hour and you know,

'I'm aware that I've begun a pretty huge narrative with a lot of characters already and even though there was a night of the World to read like one enormous, incredibly colourful, surrealistic journey.'Ĭlive is staying tight-lipped about the details, but he has talked in more general terms about the puzzles generated by a world of multiple places and times and how important it is to tie everything together. At the end of four books there are going to be half-a-million words and 500 oil paintings, and I want that four-book The third one is very shaped, very predestined, because I pretty much know where The same was true to an extent with the second book,Īlthough I started to become more of a shaper of the world.

The sense that, with the first book I was letting the paintings tell me what was going on. 'I want Book Three to build to something fairly dramatic, and Book Four to be on a whole new level of excitement, so I'm not quite as passive - in I've really got to break it, otherwise I'm not going to get the climax that my audience deserves. ItĬan't be the unruly stallion any longer.

Now that I'm into the third book and starting to think about the climax of this narrative, I have to take charge of it a little bit. 'I have plot outlines for part three and some notions for four, based on the 270 paintings that I haven't used so far, but I may develop some new Later, after Book 2 had been published - but, again, before Clive decided he needed five books to tell the whole story, not four, he told a magazine

Abarat book 1