Extra: Read All About It

The Helford Series: 11 Fun Facts

*Spoilers for TS and PG ahead*

So I was rereading Toy Soldiers the other day, the first time I had actually looked at the manuscript since I originally published it to Wattpad, and not only did it make me want to cringe and immediately start rewriting it, but it also made me want to talk about some of the details and parallels in the two stories that you might not have noticed if you weren’t looking for them. So, here is a random list that you don’t have to read, but I think it’s interesting:

1)                    Shawn was originally the good guy, and Woodburn was the bad guy. It didn’t take until about chapter four when I realized it should be the other way around.

2)                    The assassin sent to the ballroom during chapter seven of TS was actually an Underground agent that Woodburn sent to put doubt into Caitie’s head about Helford—obviously, it went wrong and, to save the secrecy of his organization, Woodburn killed the assassin in front of Caitie, making it look like he was trying to save her.

3)                    When the ballroom goes up in flames in TS7, Caitie realizes that she doesn’t want to die in the fire, and that’s where I realized that would be how Caitie died—in an inferno. She met Jonathon in fire; and she said goodbye to him in fire.

4)                    I initially planned to end TS with what became the epilogue of PG. I wanted Caitie to have been on the run, and it jumped forward, and I wanted her to sacrifice herself, but I realized that I didn’t have the room to put that kind of plot on TS, so I just wrote another story. So the series was always going to end the way it did in PG—Caitie dying, and someone finishing her story for her.

5)                    I didn’t know anything about what the plot of TS would be until about chapter ten, when I first wrote a real chapter plan for it. Before that, I was kind of just going with the flow.

6)                    I originally ended TS with both Jonathon and Rian dead. I changed my mind when I realized that it would be more shocking if she actually picked one.

7)                    Alexander DuPont was originally planned to be a dark guy, more of a political cretin. As you can tell by many of the items on this list thus far, I tend to completely change things at random for absolutely no reason at all.

8)                    The title for Playing God is actually in TS’s chapter nine. Caitie talks about her having played God killing people the way that she has, and it was then that I wrote it down as a possible change of title from TS. I ended up using it for the sequel instead. Yay sequels.

9)                    Rian tells Caitie that he pulled the alarms in the DuPont house for a drill in TS26. It becomes later known that Parker was the one making sure that she didn’t hurt Jonathon. Put together the blanks—Rian and Parker were working together, and they both shared the title of being Underground. I hope that hurts.

10)                 Also a little known detail: Parker makes a joke about not telling anyone, even Interpol, about his and Jonathon’s secrets in TS26. I’m literally still laughing about that. I’m sure Interpol was laughing as well because Parker was probably wearing a wire.

11)                 By the way, Parker was originally written to be a fluff character, and somehow he ended up being a secret agent. These things happen.