EXCELLENT, I thought, when I saw the latest storyblog topic. I know about second books. I’m right in the middle of one. It’s my second novel, my second book for DFB and the second in a trilogy. I am all about second books right now.

In fact I am so all about second books that I almost failed to write this blogpost. I was going to cop out with an apology and a picture of some lemurs instead.

I guess you can still have the lemurs:

Anyway, yes. My second book. It’s called The Goblin’s Gift, and just LOOK at it:

(NB this is the work of cover superstars David Wyatt and Alison Gadsby)

So at the moment I’m sweating blood to make sure that the story is just as exciting as the cover. I don’t know if it’s working. It’s hard to tell when you’re knee-deep in edits. But it does have invisible warships in it, and a nine-year-old crime lord and an angry troll in a dress. You know what, I think it’s going to be good. I think it is.

I don’t think it will be what anyone expects though. One of the cool things about talking to people who’ve read The Demon’s Watch is when they try and guess what happens next. At one school I visited the students came up with their own ideas for sequels, and we had all kinds of amazing stuff I hadn’t thought of: X secretly feeding Y a love potion; A dressing up as B to rescue C; and one really clever idea where the whole story took place over the course of someone falling from a cliff.

It reminded me that once a book is out there in the wild, the characters take on their own lives in each reader’s mind. They belong to anyone and everyone. But the injustice of it is that when it comes to writing book two, I’m still in charge.

Don’t worry though, I won’t kill anyone off.

Or will I?

Conrad Mason’s first children’s novel, The Demon’s Watch, is now out(!) and features goblins, pirates, magic and skulduggery. You can follow him on twitter – @conradwrites – and you can find him on facebook here!