Saving the world again
With Skulduggery Pleasant: Dead or Alive, Derek Landy says he is almost at the end of the adventures of Valkyrie, Skulduggery and Omen, but then, he said that before! He tells us about the 14th book in the bestselling series
Well it’s the 14th book in the series, so I’m not sure that I’d be able to condense it into a simple synopsis! Su ce it to say, my heroes once again face unimaginable odds that threaten the entire world, all of reality, and they have to battle on with charm and a couple of beheadings and save the world once again.
What is Dead or Alive about?
at’s a lot of books…when the rst Skulduggery
Pleasant came out in 2007, did you plan to write so many?
No. I mean, when I was writing the rst book, I was just focused on getting a book nished. When my agent responded well to it and said, ‘OK, now you need to rewrite it because I want to send it to publishers.’ Yeah. So on my rewrite, I started thinking, ‘OK, if this actually happens and it is published, I love the characters so much that I don’t want to stop.’ So I seeded a nine-book series into that rst book.
When I met with my publishers, Harpercollins, they all sat around this huge table and they said, ‘Do you have any plans for more?’ And I said I had plans for nine and there were smiles on all their faces that lit up the room.
Nine books is a huge undertaking, but by the time we got to book seven, I realised that there was more. But I did nine like I always said I would and so for two years, all the readers thought that it was over. en I said, by the way, in a few months we’ll be having another.
So one book became nine and nine books became 15.
I imagine you at the centre of this giant web of plans and ideas for 15 books…are you writing the next book while you’re writing the current one?
I have it in mind. To a degree, I’ve got them all planned out. I do leave enough space in every plot to allow it to evolve and become the thing that it is meant to become. at said, for all of my plans and all of my complicated character arcs and all of the stu that as a writer I am concerned about, you think I would get Valkyrie’s age right…
She started o as 12 and now she’s 27, and yet she’s not. Fans pointed out that she’s actually 25. I got my maths wrong. In school, I was all about English. I was all about writing. I was dreadful at maths. It shows because I just spent the last few days with the help of Twitter, with the help of readers in America, in England, a few in Ireland, who have made graphs and charts of what age she is in the books and what age she actually should be.
So for the last few days, I’ve been combing through the books, making changes so that when they are reprinted next, they will be altered so their timeline will work.
ere are so many elements that I keep such a tight handle on: I have secrets that have been going on for 10 years, but I haven’t told my agent or my editor.
en I reveal something in a book and everyone goes, ‘Oh my God!’ ese are the things the fans look out for, so I’m good with those, but I am bad with adding, apparently.
is is the penultimate book in the series, so how do you think it will feel once you’ve nished? Well, you know, I thought, OK, by the end of nine, I would be sick of it all. But I’m coming to the end of what I like to call phase two, and I’m still having an absolute blast. ere’s an argument to be made that the Skulduggery series is only one huge, massive book.
In between phases one and two, I went o and I wrote a di erent trilogy, the Demon Road books. In a way, that was like my second book.
So now I’m coming to the end of phase two and once again I get to devote some time to something that isn’t Skulduggery and a er all these years, it is such a thrill to be able to think of something di erent.
It’s also really scary because I know Skulduggery and Valkyrie and they have been my friends since the books were out and also since I started writing them in 2005. So I’m going to have to say goodbye once again to that comfort blanket and it’s like completely new territory.