Writing Charlotte

Writing Charlotte

So, I’m hoping that by the back end of next week, I will have ‘Her Enemy’s Promise’ ready for you, the final part of ‘Charlotte’s Search”.

I’m doing my best to make it a gripping read. I promised long ago that I would tie up all the threads and bring the series around full circle to give a satisfying ending. I’m holding to that promise.

I can only say I am delighted at how the series as a whole and the last few episodes in particular, have been received, with almost exclusively five-star reviews.

I will say that I never anticipated reaching 1,100,000 words to tell the story….

*sigh*

Anyway, I’ve recently been asked a couple of times, did I intend the series to be so long? And when the question was posted again on my Private Facebook Group – ‘Simone’s Secret Rose Garden’ (If you would like to join my group, click here)  this morning, it galvanised me to give you a proper answer.

The Short Answer…

The short answer is ‘No’. I never envisaged anything like this length of story. And yes, over time, there have been changes.

But that really doesn’t tell anyone anything, does it?

The Long Answer

The long answer is, I think rather more interesting and helpful…

Part of the answer comes in a much earlier blog post I wrote, about How I Became a Writer of Erotica. You can find it here.

I’ll not repeat all that again, but the long and short is that in its original form I wrote a little story, about 5,000 words, titled ‘Charlotte Chastised’.  I wrote it in the first place, not for publication at all, but as something to keep my partner entertained while he was travelling away 😉

That story became what is now Part One of ‘Bought by the Billionaire’ – ‘The Master’s Maid’. And the main character in it changed her original name from ‘Charlotte’ to ‘Elizabeth’: Beth as we now know her.

Anyway, once I learned something about book marketing, that short tale, and the ones that followed it to make up the series did alright and were earning me money.

So, I kept writing in the same vein: short erotica stories of around 5,000 words each. I could turn out one a week and I marketed myself as ‘Coffee Break Erotica’ – i.e. ‘hot’ stories short enough to read over your coffee break but add a kick to your latte.

And I wrote these stories as pure erotica – there were no long-term plans for any of the characters. What is now ‘Buying the Virgin’ Box Set One, was never meant to be any more than five shorts in sequence to produce a novella-length title I could charge $2.99 for.

So, I wrote the last story in the sequence, ‘The Virgin – Fulfilled’, where Charlotte has finished her week with James and Michael and waves goodbye. And that was going to be that. But some instinct had warned me to leave the ending of the story open.

And the instinct was right.

I should explain that until I started doing all this, I had never read a romance book in my life, except for one of my Gran’s old Mills and Boon that was lying around one rainy day when I was about nine. I grew up as a science fiction and fantasy reader. So, I had no idea of the romance tropes. I didn’t know there was supposed to be an HEA.

I was quickly told. lol! The amount of feedback I got… Charlotte should have stayed with James and Michael…

Anyway, as luck would have it, I took part in a couple of author promos over the following few months, themed for Christmas and Valentine’s Day. Some extra stories about Charlotte, James and Michael were ideal contributions. ‘The Virgin’s Holiday’, ‘The Virgin’s Christmas’ and ‘The Virgin’s Valentines’ were all a part of this. And at this point, I am still writing with the intention of them being deeply erotic but not much more.

Except that by now, the personalities of the characters are asserting themselves. The depth of the bond between Charlotte and her Master is becoming clear. And, since Michael is in love with her, how does he react?

Truly, until, I never intended for any of this. It just happened. But as I arrived at writing ‘The Virgin’s Master’, it was dawning on me that I had a real story on my hands; one in which I needed to develop the characters, explore their motivations, think about What If? The motivations were particularly important because, although the story is, at root, a romantic fantasy, there is nothing in there that couldn’t actually happen out there in the real world, to real people.

So, I came to ‘The Virgin’s Summer’. And this time, instead of writing short stories piecemeal, and making it up as I went along, I had a plan; a plan that would account for Why Charlotte chose to sell herself in the way she did. Why she was so hell-bent on going to university? Why she is attracted to two such dissimilar men?

And because I had already set James up as an engineer (The Virgin’s Lover) – which I did because I was originally an engineer myself, so I know what I’m talking about – I needed to give him a job and a setting. He needed to work for someone.

Lo and behold – I didn’t have to invent any of that. I already had a handy property-developing billionaire on tap. Enter Richard Haswell of ‘Bought by the Billionaire’ to the story. So, I had a City, a background and a setting.

And so, we move on – in ‘The Virgin’s Summer’: Charlotte’s background comes out; her history of being somehow trafficked/kidnapped/stolen as a child, the information that she has an enemy, Klempner, who holds some kind of grudge against her…

And I want to tell more: ‘The Virgin and the Masters’

But the story by now is wayyyy beyond what I originally intended and much more complicated. To date, I have told everything from Charlotte’s point of view (POV). For what I want to tell now, a single POV isn’t enough. And while it’s a personal opinion, I don’t care for omniscient POV as a writing form.

So along come Beth’s and Michael’s POVs.

I considered whether to write James’ POV as well at this stage, but I always wanted to keep him a bit of a dark horse. I preferred James’ depth of feeling to be shown by his actions rather than to get inside his head. However, by the time I had reached the end of ‘The Virgin and the Masters’, I was getting so many requests for the earlier parts of the story to be retold with Michael’s POV included, rather than just Charlotte’s, that I knew I had to do something about it.

Now, in the background to all this, I was doing other things too. As I type this, I have been a writer now for around four years, making my living from it for about three of those. And over time I have put a lot of effort into, not just the writing itself, but of learning the craft of story-telling. I always had a natural talent for words, the English language and all that goes with it, but that’s not the same as honing your skills, learning techniques, story structure, tropes, expectations. And I was feeling that it was paying off and that as I kept writing, my stories, and my telling of them were improving. ‘Bought by the Billionaire’ may be the first thing I wrote that made me real money, but it’s far from being the best thing I ever wrote.

Also, Charlotte’s story had grown like topsy, randomly. And I wanted to re-tell it properly. But to do so was a risk. It meant re-covering a lot of old ground. So, I put out a poll, in one of my old newsletters.

You Can See It Here:

The results were eye-opening for me.

Over 85% of responses said they would like to read this. But the other point was what came back in the rest of the feedback, with one request after another to include James’ POV as well.

I went on to ask in my newsletter for feedback on any questions you had about Charlotte, James or Michael; loose ends, puzzles, mysteries. I wanted to try to include everything in a way that would hold true to the characters and tell a great story.

Thus was born ‘Mastering the Virgin’.  Even the name came from another poll in which I asked for suggestions for the new series title.

In writing ‘Mastering’, I also discovered there was a theme for the saga, Consent. It had been there all there time since ‘The Virgin’s Summer’ Part Two, when James becomes jealous, loses it and punishes Charlotte, ignoring her safeword. As a direct result, Charlotte leaves him and Michael, and the two have to work together to recover their Triad.

I have quite a lot more to say on the subject of consent, but I’m leaving that for another blog post.

‘Mastering the Virgin’ involves 18 episodes and about 450,000 words. It took the story, roughly speaking, to the same point as ‘Buying the Virgin’, with Klempner imprisoned and a possible HEA for the Triad. I could have married Charlotte to Michael, called that an HEA, ended it there.

But I found I didn’t want to.

Writing ‘Mastering’ answered a lot of questions, but opened others. And there was simply no space within that part of the tale to answer the oldest of all the questions: What was the link between Beth and Charlotte?

To answer this, and others, meant travelling back several generations to the roots of the Kimberley and Haswell families. it meant exploring what made Klempner what he is and…

I’m saying no more on that right now. Suffice it to say that ‘Charlotte’s Search’ to find her mother became inevitable.

I do have a little extra for you, which I didn’t want to reveal until this part of the story (Spoilers for those still reading the earlier books) just to clarify things a bit: the family tree linking Charlotte and Beth. I hope it helps.

Lastly, while you will have to read ‘Her Enemy’s Promise’ for the ending of ‘Charlotte’s Search’, one final point…

For those of you saying to me, I want the ending of the series but I don’t want the story to end… I’ve not done with the Triad yet. I’m far too fond of them all 🙂

Happy Reading 🙂

Simone