I can’t believe it, but it’s true.
I had a sort-of-feeling, and when I checked on Amazon I was right. The Case of the Black Tulips, the first book in the Caster & Fleet series, will be one year old on 19 June. I told my husband and he said ‘Is that all?’ And I must admit I know what he means.
In some ways, as with lots of things, it seems like a long time, and then again it’s absolutely flown. My co-writer Paula Harmon and I really had no idea what we were getting into. I think in our original call to discuss the project (since we hadn’t met in real life then) I said something vague about ‘What if it turned out to be a series?’ However any thoughts of that were well in the future, tempered by a sensible desire to take things slowly, not rush, not let this co-writing project interfere with other things that we had going on, etc.
And here we are, 18 months or so after that call, editing book 6. Yes, I know. It just goes to show how much willpower the pair of us have. In our defence, though, I think we were hapless victims of Katherine and Connie, who had basically kidnapped us by halfway through the first book. We got so caught up in their adventures that (as Reg might say) we were done up like a pair of kippers. Resistance was futile. And as we found, readers enjoyed it too.
There’s no denying that other things have occasionally been bumped out of the way by the unstoppable progress of our two heroines, such as book 5 of my Pippa Parker series and book 2 of Paula’s Murder Britannica series, but it has, in the main, been tremendous fun. Otherwise I don’t think we would have been able to keep going at the pace we have.
So what of book 6? Well, it’s called The Case of the Crystal Kisses and it is going to be the last in the Caster & Fleet series – certainly in this incarnation. Hopefully it will have enough happy endings to satisfy almost anybody! I will give it a blog post of its own soon.
But if you’ve enjoyed writing the series so much, why are you ending it?
Well, as I’ve said in a previous blog, there are other things we would both like to do, other projects we would like to engage in, and other series we would like to write. Even at this point, when we’re still editing book 6, I’m looking ahead to the rest of the year and thinking about shiny new things I could do. Plus Paula and I are planning to write another series together, in good time. And I suspect that Katherine and Connie will return; whether in their own series or as secondary characters in someone else’s series, who knows?
So happy first birthday, Caster and Fleet. You’ve been such fun to get to know, and let’s hope that there are many happy returns!
The featured image is Birthday Cake – Candles by Jessica Diamond and is reproduced by permission of Creative Commons license 2.0. The image has been cropped a tiny bit so that the candle flames show in the header.
Liz Hedgecock 