The Return of Victoria Frankenstein!

On March, 1998, I began writing a sequel to The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, the YA novel I serialized on this blog some months back (January 9 through May 1, 2013) and which you can now purchase on Amazon/Kindle (link to the book).

At some point I quit working on the sequel--I don't remember why--but I stuck the pages in a binder, shoved it on a shelf, made some digital copies, and drifted on to other projects.  I also returned to teaching in the fall of 2001 when I joined Western Reserve Academy for a ten-year stretch I enjoyed tremendously.

And so I pretty much forgot about the sequel.

Months ago, when I started serializing (and doing a major revision of Packet One), I remembered the 2nd volume but didn't really think about continuing with it.  As far as I could remember, there wasn't much there, and I'd decided to serialize Spoon River Middle School next (a series just completed)--and then I was going to serialize Frankenstein Sundae, a memoir about my ten-year pursuit of Mary Shelley and her story.

But ...

The other day I quite randomly saw the old notebook, opened it up, and was surprised to discover that I'd written about ninety pages of the book.  I flipped through it.  Not too bad.  Even better: I had notes for where I'd intended to go next with it.

But when I looked at the digital copies--some problems.  I was using WordPerfect then (MS-Word does not do a word-perfect conversion of those files), and for some reason I was missing in digital form a couple of the chapters I did have on hard copy.  So that meant a couple of things: pasting the old WP files into Notepad (thereby deleting all the old formatting), re-doing the relevant formatting, typing into the new files the chapters that were missing.  Whew.

But that's all done.  I now have a clean digital Word copy I can revise and continue.

Still ... I know I'm going to have to make some substantial changes--mostly because of the alterations I made in the first volume while I was serializing it earlier this year.  That's okay.  I'll have fun doing it.

I've conceived of this as a trilogy--dealing with Vickie's 6th, 7th, and 8th grade years.  The first volume had lots of wild violence (from tornadoes to water spouts to evil geniuses, to modified human creatures, and so on); the second volume, as I read it now, is a little quieter--Vickie dealing with some difficult emotional issues--principally her relationship with a new classmate named Gil, a boy she meets very early in the story.  I'll probably have to add some blood-n-guts and vampires and such.

Anyway, the sequel begins soon on DawnReader--and will follow my customary M-W-F pattern.  And when I finish (if I finish!), I will revise again, convert it to a Kindle file, and upload it for sale as an e-book.

I hope you enjoy the sequel.  It's a little scary, launching into something I haven't finished--and haven't even looked at in more than a decade.  But kind of exciting, too.