The Immorality of Immortality: Gambling a Fairytale

Welcome back and thank you for joining me in this continuation of my descriptions of what it was like to write the Immorality of Immortality trilogy. Too long an intro? Whatever. This week it's book two: Gambling a Fairytale! Like Playing with Reality, Gambling a Fairytale can now be found on Kindle for 77p! It is also in paperback.

Here's a link to last week's blog post (Playing with Reality) if you missed it:

And here's the introductory blog post if you missed that too. If you did, where have you been?

“Life just isn’t fair.  And death is no exception.”

“The unknown is filled with darkness and darkness is where nightmares become reality.

Sometimes you awake from nightmares.  But sometimes you’re not so lucky."

Through the eyes of both Felix and Damien, Gambling a Fairytale leaves you breathless as the trilogy continues.

A Lot of Background

So after ‘Playing with Reality’ there was a lot of work to do.  In the process of writing PWR, Felix and Damien fed me information about what happened next: ‘Gambling a Fairytale’ and ‘Chancing the Truth’.  I knew straight away that GAF was going to be very difficult to write as it was going to break my heart in places.

I had to write the plot out in bullet points with gaps between so when I got round to it I could fill in the spaces.  Now this page has arrows everywhere as with GAF one thing really does lead to another.

The thing that was most certain was that I’d have to introduce Damien as a narrator.  Now this was something I was very excited about.  Not only do you get to know things that Felix doesn’t know (you gotta love dramatic irony) but you also get to know Damien personally.  Maybe his mind works a little differently than you expected, or perhaps you hit the nail on the head and he’s everything you’d thought he’d be.  Either way, Damien’s point of view is vital for the progression of the story.  And as you can image, he was chatty in my head.  His chapters were always faster to write that Felix’s.  Damien talks more and thinks less.  But less about what you already know.

The experience was very different from PWR because I wasn’t waiting for pieces of plot.  I had everything, I just had to fit it altogether.  This did frustrate me eventually and I stopped writing it about twenty-per-cent of the way in.  After a couple of months however, I got over myself and created James* to push me in the right direction.

The reason for this character, as well as the little nudge to finish off this story, was that my boyfriend was appalled that he hadn’t had a character named after him.  How could I not oblige?  He is my illustrator after all.

*Luckily for me, James made the plot make a lot more sense!

I’ve never been more glad that I stuck to it, because once I’d started again, that was it.  I couldn’t stop.  For anything.  I fell in love again and cried when my characters did.  It was emotional for all of us, GAF, I can tell you that.  I felt like a part of me died when I’d finished it.

Phew.  A breather was needed.

So I wrote a zombie book: ‘ZA’.*

Yep, between finishing GAF in October 2011 and starting CTT in January 2012, I wrote a novel.  If I was going to be accurate I wrote it between the first and the twenty-ninth of November.  This is was, of course, NaNoWriMo. (National Novel Writing Month) 2011 was my first wrimo and I've done it every year since. It's too rewarding not to!

*ZA can now be found on Kindle for 77p and the first few chapters are on Movellas.

After a very painful and long editing process (which took me until 2013!) I was absolutely certain that GAF was ready and that both Damien and Felix were looking their best.  It was then I published GAF in February 2013.



So that's Gambling a Fairytale, a book that improved my writing in a remarkable way. I learnt to stick with it and write and carry on regardless. I must've taught myself something because it's never taken me as long to write a book than it took to write GAF. GAF was a lesson I had to learn and I realised, even more, how much I wanted to be an author.

Next week's the exciting one. Chancing the Truth (still coming soon Autumn 2014)


Molly Looby
Author of the Immorality of Immortality trilogy