The Immorality of Immortality: Chancing the Truth

You made it! Here is the fourth and final post in my Immorality of Immortality blog post series. If you've missed the three before it, go and read the introduction so you know what's going on.
And here are the Playing with Reality and Gambling a Fairytale posts from last week and the week before.
This week it's Chancing the Truth, my absolute favourite for so many reasons! And I can't wait to share it with the world!

“We’ll never be free.  Only the end can release us.”

“Forget Adelina, Stephan’s the real god of this castle.  You disobey and you get punished.  You’re plunged into hell and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Unless of course he goes too far.  Unless of course you’re given something to live for.  Unless of course you’re strong enough to fight.

I wasn’t a year ago.

I am now.

I am Felix Hesper and I am in control."

Through the eyes of Felix, Damien and Lilya, the newest addition to the Senate, Chancing the Truth takes you on a journey to the heart wrenching finale of the Immorality of Immorality trilogy.

A Lot of Background

*You should know before I begin that I changed quite a lot of this to save you from too many spoilers.

Well ‘Chancing the Truth’, enter Lilya. What else can I start with? This new character changes everything and I am more excited about seeing what everyone thinks of her than I am about what everyone thinks of the plot.

I thought up the plot of CTT while still writing ‘Playing with Reality’. It essentially just continued from ‘Gambling a Fairytale’, which wrote itself in my head at the same time. The two seemed to come to me instantaneously. It may not seem like it, but I had to decide where one ended and the next begun. But of course that divide would be Lilya shaped.

I outlined the plot much the same as I did for GAF except there was a lot more of it meaning a lot more notes. I scribbled all over these pages. Well, let’s face it; I had a lot to cover. And no, I never thought it would ever be 500 pages long.

CTT was the most hands-on I think – note wise. I have notes for everything. But I did have a lot to do. I had chambers and clothes and back stories and all sorts. You see more of the Senate than ever before, which meant I had to walk around the corridors of the Senate with my eyes and my notebook open. Basically sitting at my desk with my eyes shut talking to Felix, Lilya and Damien (or myself if you want to be like that).

Not only this but I had to outline to myself in the greatest of detail the pasts of Stephan Hunter and Hugo Sharpe. I knew them – of course – but I needed every gory detail. That was a fun week I can tell you. Up to my eyeballs in Renaissance and Dark Ages research is always great.

More fun still was seeing how Damien coped not being Felix’s number one concern. This I found very interesting, and at points I felt I was the only one who loved him even through his stupidity.

Something new that came out while writing CTT was that I loved being girly with Lilya. You’ll notice she talks about her clothes more than the others. I loved imagining and describing her outfits, but in such a way that wasn’t girly. I loved that. I'd not really been able to do that before. I loved Lilya’s whole attitude.

I just adore Lilya.

Her chapters essentially wrote themselves. It was a job to keep up to be honest. And in comparison to this, writing Felix chapters always felt so much slower. I love Lilya’s chattiness. The way she speaks to the reader, she’s not just telling them a story, she’s holding a conversation. She's asking your opinion and imploring you to understand. That style is great fun to write.

The editing process for CTT was the most involved I’ve ever been in making my work perfect.The final draft of CTT is 60 pages and 15,000 words shorter than my first draft and it is so much better to read because of it. Everything means something and leads you somewhere, without missing any of the personality of the narrators.

After me and my reading team had spent a good seven weeks going through it, I was more confident than ever in my trilogy.

So in 2014 at 20 years old, I published ‘Chancing the Truth’, by myself this time, and at last, the ‘Immorality of Immortality trilogy’ was complete. *

*I know it's not out yet but it's coming. I swear. Before Christmas!

So now you know some of what I went through when I sat and decided yes, I wanted to write a book about vampires. Not only that, I wanted to prove that I could achieve anything. To this day, I've written four books since finishing 'Chancing the Truth' and it's still perfect in my eyes. That's saying something pretty powerful. CTT, like all the others, changed me as a writer. Maybe it'll change you as the reader. Just you wait and see.

Molly Looby
Author of the Immorality of Immortality trilogy
molly.looby@hotmail.com
Immorality of Immortality Facebook page