The Poor Sequel

A lot of my stories get a sequel, and a lot of those turn into a trilogy, or are supposed to do so. Those who still have a story to tell after three entries, can become larger pieces of work, though this seldom happens in my world of writing. One thing I find, is that the bloody second part, the first sequel, is often the place where everything goes wrong. Let me tell you about some of my sequels, and intended sequels, and how they turned out compared to the first (and perhaps third) entry.

Sanguine 2:
Back in 2007 I wrote a story called Sanguine. It's about how the wife of the devil and a friend of the devil goes to earth to wreak havoc in order to have a good time. I felt that the story is alright, presenting several interesting gore-scenes, and an all-over okey idea for a action/horror story. The ending basically said that the devil himself would like to come with the two others the next time they were going to earth. This is where the idea of a sequel enters. I started writing this sequel, trying to come up with more gore-filled scenarios where the devil would mess around with humans. However, the devil turned out to be to powerful a being for me to really write about in this way, as the story just turned into a series of scenes where the devil brutally murdered people in less and less inventive ways. Of course, the sequal was scrapped, and is still hidden away somewhere.

Chemical Wedding, Part 2:
This is the second part of a finished trilogy. However, the second part is really just leading to the third, and little actually happens to further the plot, which is the greatest problem of nr.2's in a trilogy. This isn't as good or as well written as part 1 and 3, and it doesn't make as much sense.

The Unholy Trinity, Part 2: The Antichrist:
This is also the second part of a finished trilogy, but is also mostly a filler. And besides, the ending is awful, really =p

The New Mask 2:
I once wrote a horror/slasher/comedy/spoof thing that I called The New Mask. It wasn't very good, and so when I started writing a second part, it was (of course) really awful, and I didn't have to write more than a couple hundred words to realize that I would never finish or post a second part to the story.

Departed - Part Two:
This is the second part of an unfinished series. The third part hasn't been finished, and I don't know if it will be. Really, the first part of this gave closure, and I think people would like the story better if they only read the first part. This second part isn't crappy though, just confusing I think, and it sets the scene for a larger story that might never get written. This one luckily has an ending that can sort of give closure to the whole thing, and therefor doesn't seem like another filler to a third part, and I'm glad.

Buccaneer Sky - Part 2: We Sail The Jolly Roger:
This second part in another unfinished series really didn't feel the same way as the first part, and is definately filler, without really leading to something serious, or anything at all that the reader can expect from the third part. A third part was started, but hasn't been finished yet. I really liked this series, and enjoyed writing it, and I still like the first part a lot, but this second part hasn't got anything to bring to the table, and isn't particularly good. It's a shame, cause I think the series could have turned out alright... Oh well.

Kain, Hunted:
This is the follow up to Kain, Nightunter. It has a few ideas incorporated that I've been working on, and that I wrote about earlier. However, this one also feels incredibly like a filler, as it definately serves the purpose of leading up to the third part. In the third part, I plan to try introducing an overarching villain, as I wrote about in an earlier post here. I don't think this story is bad, but it certainly left out some of what I think made the first part good. Focusing more on action, this part has neglected a lot of detail, like the description of characters that destinguished the first part. This one has a lot of gore, but little of it is fleshed out, and this one also lacks the sexual content and foul language of the first one, resebling some of my early work more than the first part of the series. With the third part, I want to get back to the feel of the first one, and make a good sequel, trying to ignore the crude style of the poor first sequel.

(I'm not the only one doing this. Dracula 2: Ascension. Pirates of the Caribbean 2. The Matrix 2 and 3. AVP2. The new Indiana Jones movie. Ghost Busters 2. Saw 2. Movies are a great example of poor sequels, and I guess the same often rings true for written works)

The Names Are In The Music

A lot of my inspiration come from music, as I am always listening to music when I write. Sometimes I listen to heavy metal, sometimes it's 80's pop, and sometimes it's irish and celtic music. I listen to a lot of different music, and I'm usually able to draw some sort of inspiration from most of it. However, I do find that I also like to draw character names from songs that I like. If I find a characters name in a song, I can often get other inspiration for that character from the same song or the same band. Here's an example of characters I've named after songs, or fund inspiration for in songs:

Mephisto - The main character of my unfinished novel was not named after a song, but after hearing the song 'Mephisto' by Moonspell, I incorporated parts of the song in the character, such as the line 'I am an angel who dresses in red', leading to the idea of him wearing mostly red and black clothes. (The fact that he was a fallen angel however, I established earlier).

Cassandra - The titular character of my short story 'Cassandra' is named after the song by the same name by Theatre of Tragedy. In the song they sing 'She hath no life but the one he for her wrought', which led to the idea that the character had no life, but the one 'he' for her wrote, the whole basis of the story.

Messalina and Nightwing - These two characters from Kain, Nighthunter are both the titles of songs by Inkubus Sukkubus, and alongside the song 'Sanctuary' by the same band, they helped establish several ideas I incorporated into the story.

Characters from Mephisto - In mephisto I had a character named Cassandra, named after the same song that named the short story. I also had a character named Lillith, partially inspired by the song 'heart of lillith' by Inkubus Sukkubus. Another of their songs inspired the character Atrocity from Mephisto, and made me create a backstory based on the song. The character Beltaine was also inspired by one of their songs. A character called Luna/Lisa was named after the song 'Luna' by Moonspell and 'Lisa' by Lita Ford... And yes, in the story it makes sense that she has two names. The idea for this novel was that I'd pay homage to some of my favorite bands and authors by naming characters, locations and such after them or their work, without copying of course, so I mainly stuck to first names. Some characters however, like Azrael, Lucifer and Lucifierra were harder to link to any particular piece of work, but all of them were in turn inspired by pieces of music I was listening to while writing. I could probably make a soundtrack for each character and chapter at the time of writing =)

So yeah, to sum up, I use a lot of music to inspire my writing, and in particular my characters. I've found that Inkubus Sukkubus is a great band to look at when I want a character-name that suits the sort of mythology I'm going for in works like Mephisto and Kain, Nighthunter. And yes, the picture on top is of Inkubus Sukkubus. I thank them for all the inspiration they have given me so far when listening to their albums, and all the inspiration they will continue to give me in the future =D

Kain, Nighthunter

As I was away in holiday this last week, I didn't get any writing done... However, a lot of ideas popped into my head. A surprisingly large amount of these ideas featured or somehow had something to do with the character Kain and the other characters I made for my last story Kain, Nighthunter.

I've walked around with an idea of how to start a new chapter in the story of Kain since I posted the last part. Kain is to have a wife, a fairy, who is tiny (like most faeries) at day, but grows to the size of a human at night. Their house is to be attacked by evil creatures at the start of the next chapter, and Kain then goes to see Messalina and Nightwing in order to find out who sendt the creatures, what they want, and where to find them.

After a long time of thinking about this new chapter, I found myself coming up with backstories for both Kain, Messalina and Nightwing, and I made up a story that I somehow want to feature in the Kain-universe, even hough I'm unsure how. I also made a backstory for some of the creature-types featured in the last and the upcoming part.

The hardest thing to make up, is the main villain. In the last part Cathola was the main bad-guy(/girl), but I wanted her to be stopped fairly easy (as Messalina did, at the end of the story), so that she wouldn't feel too powerful. I have plans to set her actions in a broader perspective though, and I want her to be associated with a bigger bad-guy, that I want to introduce in this part.

I don't know why, but I've always had a problem writing about bad-guys that are persistant in my works. In my longest piece of work to date, my unfinished novel Mephisto, there was never a clear villain. In the start, Mephisto was introduced as the villain, but turned out to be one of the prominent good-guys. Then I introduced a long time foe of Mephisto called Atrocity, but I made Mephisto kill him early on. Then I introduced Beltaine, who kidnapped both Mephisto and other friends of the main-character. Later on, Beltaine converted to the side of the protagonist, and I still lacked an antagonist. I guess the closest I came was the archangel Peter, who tried to set up a war between heaven and hell. This character was never met by the main character however, and only mentioned several times, making a very uninvolved antagonist. In the stories about Kain, I want a more involved antagonist, and I want to make it a good one. Good luck to me =p

Any tips or hints about how to do this? Please leave a comment ;)