Tying the threads together

One of the advantages of writing the second book of a trilogy immediately after you've finished writing the first one is that you remember the first book in detail.  And I've taken advantage of that in my writing this week.

I've just written a tense scene in book two with my sentient soulship where she has to access some alien computer code.  Of course, I made it into a cliffhanger where the ship wasn't talking to the human characters and they thought she was dead.  I wanted  them to think that she'd  been attacked by alien malware.

That gave me the opportunity to add a reminiscence from one of the viewpoint characters about something he'd done in book one.  The book starts with him as a drug-addled wreck trying to steal a memory crystal for a gang boss.  That reminiscence also allowed me to have him think about what his sister had told him about how the soulship's memory system works.  It was a useful way to recap information given in book one without info-dumping.

In these books the brother is an artist.  One of the reasons for doing this was because the second set of clues are found in paintings.  I wanted the brother to be enthusiastic about finding them, keeping everyone going at the down times when they weren't finding anything.  In book one he runs away from the criminal gang.  When he's returned to civilisation one of the first things he does is buy art supplies.  In book two I've linked back to that, via his reminiscences when he's buying more art supplies.

I'm also going to be linking the books together through devices like meetings.  My main characters belong to a Great Family, of which there are seven.  Think aristocratic Entlish families with large estates.    The planet has democracy, but the Great Families still exert a lot of influence, and periodically they come together to discuss things in a Great Council.  I intend to use one of these gatherings at the end of book three to tie things up, and link to a meeting in book one.

In book one, a meeting sent Arrien and her brother off on the quest to find the clues.  In the meeting in book three she'll be reporting to the Families on the success of the quest.  This will tie the last bits of the story together, and should provide a good ending for the series.

It's a satisfying feeling to take threads through three books, and to be able to tie them up together properly at the end.