What were the working titles of
Book 3 before the vote?
Well we had loads and we banded them around
at one time or another, I had another short list of titles
before this list. One of them was “The Big Smoke”, “Six
Days In December”, and “Shoot The Moon” was
a vague working title on it. But none of these titles would
have been right for it.
This is the longest Young Bond book by a narrow margin,
yet it is set over a shorter time period. Is this due to
it being a more complex story? If you look into it the books are all about the same length,
I think they are all in the region of 80,000 words. It’s
written in the same style as the other two, whether a story
takes place over three days or over three years it does
not necessary dictate the length of the book. You could
have as much incident happening over three days as over
three months.
I like the idea of a condensed timeframe and it’s
something Fleming did in Moonraker, there was a fairly
condensed time frame in that. In the writing of my books
there are echoes of what Fleming was doing. My five books
are going to very roughly echo the style, themes, and content
of his first five books.
I think it’s nice thing for kids to know that it
happens over three days, and I was trying to change the
style of story from the first two books as I didn’t
want them to become to formulaic. You have the set up during
the term and in the holiday he goes off on his adventure…
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