Keeping the clues going

Having finished re-writing my first riddle quest book, I'm now turning my mind to the second set of riddles.  I wanted to keep a similar sort of format to book one, so for book two I've switched the quest over to searching for clues in old paintings.  Arrien knows what the mystery word from book one means now, and she has to discover where that object is.   An old painting found in her own house leads her to the start of the second riddle quest.

I got the idea of putting the clues in paintings after visiting the National Gallery with a friend.  There I bought a big book on symbolism in art.  That, and the paintings I'd been studying that day, gave me lots of ideas for the next set of clues.

The book which ends the trilogy has only ever been sketchily planned out.  I knew that Arrien would have to travel the planet again, trying to find old hidden sites of alien bioengineering, but all I had was the foundation riddle for that third book.

That's wrapped up in the clues for the second quest, and it talks about looking in 'the five directions' for 'the parts'.  Arrien suspects the five directions are north, south, east, west, and a location in the centre of a continent.  But that's not much to go on, so book three will send her off on yet another quest to find those five locations.

So far so good, but for book 3 I needed to add something to help her look in the right places for those suspected bioengineering facilities.  So I tracked back into book two's clues, and altered each painting she finds a little.  They're all battle scenes, featuring a bioengineered soldier standing in front of mountain peaks.  But in my re-write of book one I've made Arrien a conservationist, so I hit on the idea of adding big cats to the paintings in book two.  So I now have five paintings with five different big cats standing beside the soldiers.

Arrien suspects the cats are the ancestors of Vedrana's current big cats, so she suggests looking for the bioengineering sites in areas which are hot-spots for each individual cat.  Problem solved.

I haven't completely mapped out the clue trail for book three yet, but I now have a much better idea of the structure of the book.  I'm confident now that I can make that set of clues work, and bring the trilogy to a satisfactory conclusion.