For any budding author in my position, the road is far from clear. I’ve managed to write a novel, but now what? Well, instead of dwelling over my inbox (no new emails, just in case you were wondering) I’ve moved on to the next story. As odd as it may sound, I’ve actually had to do a bit of research… on how to start a sequel.

I figured this would be easy, it’s just really a continuation of the first story, right? Not so much. I’ve actually found writing the beginning to the second novel quite a hard start. So I did what anyone would probably do…

I figured, I wonder how everyone else has done it?

One thing I actually found tremendously helpful (read:distracting) was I headed over to Amazon where they’ve got that fantastic Look Inside feature. With this, instead of heading over to my bookshelf to take a quick look through many of the sequels we’ve got in our home, I was able to quickly search through a number of books (especially mainstream ones) for how they started off from the one before it.

This actually would have helped with when I was trying to set the scene for my novel, as I could have done the same thing for the beginning of the trilogy. One of the best ones was just the prologue to A Game of Thrones. The quality of writing in just that first bit makes me feel like I still have so far to go. Which is fine. I mean after all, I am just starting out and that book had an editor go through it. Apples and oranges am I right?

Anyway that small tidbit of advice was really the main reason for this post. Aside from that, business as usual. Now, back to trying to start up that second novel!