When I began writing The Lost Queen, I found myself returning to a world that I knew very well. Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack had come to a resolution two years earlier, and I thought I was done with glass eyes, and German punk opera! Yet something resisted closure. The voices did not fall silent: they persisted, refusing to be set aside. Even those who were marginal in the first book began to step forward. And so, Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack would not remain a stand-alone novel, but the first movement of something larger.
A sequel, I discovered, is not about expanding the story. It is about deepening it. About weaving together all the separate voices.
And so the novel became a braid. A braid asks for an evenness of hand, a careful attention to tension, so that no one hank of hair can overwhelm the others. The strands gather, loosen, tighten and interweave so that the whole braid holds together evenly.
The Lost Queen weaves together multiple points of view, each character holding a strand of the larger narrative. Because I had come to know them so well in the first book, I trusted them. I listened to them, trusting their instincts, their contradictions, and even their silences. Writing, for me, is an act of listening—allowing each voice its moment, its pressure, its place within the weave of the story’s braid.
Perhaps that is what writing a sequel asks of the writer as well.
To return to what feels known, only to discover how much remains hidden.
To deepen the story without forcing it to grow beyond its nature.
To follow the threads, even when they lead somewhere unexpected.
And the braid, it seems, is not yet complete.
There will be a third book and final book in The Glass Rye Trilogy - An Eye for an Eye, which I am writing now. The next generation will take up the threads, weaving together what has already been set in motion, in the first two books. If the first book is about seeing, and the second about remembering, the final book will ask the questions: What we do with what we inherit? How do we gather together the strands of our collective memory? And, how we can ever bring them to rest?
In the end, The Lost Queen is not simply about finding Clara. And it isn’t just a book that segues between Book One and Book Three. It is a book about the act of searching, about the endurance required to continue when the answers are not yet clear, and the quiet conviction that the story will always reveal itself in time.
A good braid requires patience.