The More Things Change
Jim Valentine is not a happy chappy. He's reached a certain age but has little
satisfaction in anything he has achieved. He's a teacher but has no great love
of teaching and even less affection for his students. He wanted to be a writer
but has neither ability nor drive. And then he meets and old man called Joe who
changes reality for him, gives him the wife of his dreams and then takes everything
away. Big time.
Twenty years later we find him alone in a park after having written the best
seller he dreamed about and the follow up which didn't do so well. Twenty
years later he's still there. In fact he's never been anywhere else and it
doesn't feel like real life anymore. Was it ever?
And then Joe reappears and he learns the truth about just what happens when the
book ends, where all the characters go and just what has happened to him.
A bit about the writing of The More Things Change
This was my "difficult" second novel and it was difficult in a number of
different ways. My fear was that I would write another Living With the Truth.
I'd been there, done that. If I was going to think of myself as a novelist
I had to be more than a one-trick pony and I wasn't sure I could do that.
It began well enough, a bit darker than the first two and then I found myself
needing a foil for my protagonist. For a while I considered using Truth again
and quite seriously but I wanted to move away from that. Without much of a clue
who or what he was I introduced an old man, the very opposite of Truth and I
enabled this character. Whereas Truth reported, for the most part he didn't
muck about with Jonathan's life. Joe, on the other hand, changes Jim's reality.
The character of Joe didn't have to be God but, since he failed to make an
appearance in the first two books, I didn't mind toying with him as a character
in this one.
And then the worst thing happened: I stalled. And I stayed stalled for a
couple of years, long enough to abandon the project and start on other things.
So, I'd written a couple of novels. I didn't feel like much of a novelist.
Looking back, the break was the best thing that ever happened. I returned to the
project finally, never having completely forgotten it, with a new voice, a
completely new voice. The second section of the novel begins twenty years after
the events in the first and Jim is a completely different man. At first I
didn't have a clue where this new section belonged. Part of me actually thought
it might be a new book and I'd end up scrapping everything up till that point.
But, no. In time I started to see the bigger picture and went back into the
section I'd abandoned reworking it slightly so that, when the shock of the second
section came, it would be a believable shock.
Still, I had no idea how the book would end but at least I understood the
parameters of the universe I had created for my characters and so, when it did
come, the ending made sense. At least with a bit of foreshadowing written into
the first section, it did.
If writing this book taught me one thing it was to stop thinking of a novel in
linear terms. Yes, it has a beginning, a middle and an end but they don't always
get written in that order and things in the past often have to be adjusted so that
events in the future will make sense.
Living With the Truth
The More Things Change
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