Serpent Soup

This book is for

Martin Emmett

"Serpent Soup" was the most difficult and time-consuming book to write in the series. Although I started with a story outline, the characters always seemed to be getting into situations that I couldn't get them out of and there were some huge holes in the plot. This was very worrying at the time, as I had never written a sequel before, let alone a mini-series, and if the next two books were going to be as much trouble, I was not going to meet my deadline.

I wasn't at all happy with the first draft, and I ended up rewriting more than half of the book to try to make it more funny and exciting.

One of the things that I changed was Pollapopawibble's character. In the first draft, she was very friendly and eager to help Jake and Granny. Making her grumpy and resentful added more conflict to the characters' relationships, which is a tried and tested way of adding interest to a story.

One of the bigger changes that I made was relocating Granny's cottage from the town into the middle of the countryside. I'm always watching films or television programmes, in which something conspicuously strange is happening, and thinking 'surely the police would have got involved by now', or 'why isn't there a crowd of people looking on?' I realised that the soup flood would affect other people and, if the cottage was in a town, they were bound to notice where the soup was coming from. So, I moved the cottage to somewhere where nobody would notice what was going on (well almost nobody - if you've read "Ghostly Goulash" you'll know that someone does). This meant going back and rewriting bits of "Goblin Stew" so that the cottage was in the same place. This is one of the advantages of writing and publishing a whole series all in one go - you can go back and change things in earlier books.

I managed to get rid of an awkward hole in the plot by making another hole - in the chimney breast. I had planned for Granny to make her escape from the flooded kitchen by climbing up the chimney. But it wasn't until I got around to writing that part in the story that I realised that this wasn't possible. If the scalding-hot soup had risen high enough to stop her escaping through a door or a window, it would certainly be high enough to stop her escaping through the fireplace, which would be a metre or so lower. What I needed was a big hole, high up on the chimney-breast, above the level of the soup. Granny wouldn't be able to make this hole herself, it needed to be there for her, so this is where the rocket-powered saucepan came in.

Serpent Soup was full of little bits of what I call 'Elastoplast' plotting like that. At the time, it felt like I was cobbling the story together, but when I read it now, a year later, it all seems to work quite smoothly.