Three years after its release, I'm still getting an average of two emails a week asking if I ever plan to write a sequel to Hush. I think I’ll have to make a special place on my website to address this issue, but I’ll tackle it little here.
I had two different endings in mind for Hush depending on whether or not I wrote a sequel. I always kind of had a sequel in mind, and I think readers have picked up on that. Anyhoo, my publisher said there would be no sequel because they wanted me to go in a completely different direction. They wanted the next book to be a mystery, no murders, more along the lines of literary women’s fiction. I was given a list of British mysteries to read, mysteries that unfolded slowly and were very internal. Oops. Excuse my yawn. Whew. So, that’s how Sleep Tight ended up with the mystery subplot. Once Hush came out and did well, I was asked to rewrite Sleep Tight and add murders so it would be more like Hush. I was also asked to submit a proposal for a sequel to Hush.
Okay, I’m already in trouble because I ended the book differently than I would have if I’d known about the sequel. But the mystery of Ethan’s birth was never solved. All we know is that he has to be the child of someone fairly well-known, and his life would be in grave danger if the truth ever came out. So I proposed his story, which I still think would be damn good. They didn’t want Ethan’s story, period. They wanted a police procedural with Max and Ivy solving a case together. I wasted several months trying to come up with something my editor and I would both like before realizing it was never going to happen. Even though I’d left some things open in Hush, I’d also tied up too many threads for the new book to work the way they wanted it. The only thing that made sense to me was telling Ethan’s story, so I asked if we could move to something new, and that was that.
4 comments:
But the mystery of Ethan’s birth was never solved.
HEH...What had happened was that me and Chris had to much sex..and 9mths later out came in Ethan. Not to much of a mystery to me :D
damn you!!
that's funny as hell!!!
:D :D :D
jeff, my publisher and editor don't want ethan's story. if they suddenly changed their minds, i'm not sure i would still be interested after so many years. (i wrote that 6 years ago.) i don't know... i'm moving in a different direction now, away from the traditional police procedural and into more of a supernatural thriller.
wish we could edit these things. i wrote Hush 6 years ago. there's such a delay to everything in the publshing business. the delivery deadline for Hush was fall of 2000, but the book didn't come out until 2002. i think that's why publishers have such a hard time chasing fads. by the time they recognize one it's usually on its way out. they jump on it, find somebody to write it, then publish it 2 years later and the fad is over.
Post a Comment