So – mercifully what I thought of as a sort of creative dry spell has somehow come unblocked, what with putting out West Towards the Sunset this week. I had thought a little about making that book the first in a series, following the Kettering family on the emigrant trail west to California in 1846. I thought, in a rather half-hearted fashion, about creating it as part of a multivolume family story, rather like the Little House series, but nothing much came to mind, once I gotten them into California. I had set up some future elements by briefly mentioning certain developments, but the trouble was that if I carried them out completely, and brought the overall story forward to include all kinds of adventures and characters – the main character, Sally, would age out of being a tween-teen. It would also be a stretch, historically, to involve a female character in what was almost exclusively a male domain, in Gold Rush era California. The story would transition into something more like an adult novel … and I wanted to keep the main character relatable to younger readers. The poor kidlets need a good thrilling, informative read, after all the values-free grey goo and perversity that is otherwise inflicted on them by the current established YA fare.

What to do, what to do …

What to do … would be to make subsequent volumes sequentially centering on Sally’s younger brothers and sisters. Eureka! That would let me carry on with teen-tween characters within the same established family. I could write in Jon’s adventures early in the Gold Rush, and a younger sister and even younger brother pick up later segments of the overall story arc. The potential stories and characters over two decades of this part of the wild and woolly West are practically limitless. The Gold Rush itself, then the silver rush into Nevada’s Comstock Lode, odd-ball characters, vigilantes and crime galore, stage coaches, the railway and the Pony Express. I could write the youngest brother into being an associate of Samuel Clemens, when he was roughing it on the frontier in his early days as a writer. And then it seemed like I was back in the fountain of creativity; ideas for plots, characters and twists and turns of a narrative all popped into mind.

I have all the reference books already, and there were so many elements, events and real-life characters that I couldn’t fold into my previous Gold Rush book, I can hardly wait to start on the next one. But I promise that I will wrap up the Luna City series before I even start on the next book in the Kettering family saga.