Peri

Peri  (1995) Post 306

Peri has a peculiar history. I wrote a book called Another Good

Friend under contract for one company, which reneged on the contract for a reason that made no sense to me then and still makes no sense to me now. I subsequently sold the story to another company, which was happy to have a trilogy, but which changed the format to two-books-in-one, and then, finally, to two single books. The main characters in the stories, Another Good Friend and All the Sea Between were Amber (previously in three other books), Dominic (in one other book), Helen and Herrick, (both unused before). Dominic had two younger half-sisters named Peri and Sasha. 
I hatched the idea of writing some more books, focussing on Peri and Sasha. I intended calling one of them Waiting on Amber and the other, Let There Be Light... I wrote Waiting on Amber, taking up the action a few years down the track when Amber and Herrick, a high school couple, are in their twenties. They are on-again/off-again, and Herrick comes to help out with the local am dram play. Peri, in her late teens, falls for him, but eventually backs off because she feels she's "waiting on Amber". 
There's a fair bit about the play, Thousand Ships, a take on the Helen of Troy story.
The market I intended to offer that story changed (told you it was complicated), so I offered it elsewhere, and was invited to adapt it to be part of the Surfside High series by Virginia Baxter, an umbrella pen name. This consisted of lots of books, each focussing on a teenaged girl attending Surfside High. There were a few teachers and such which could be in the story, and we could use characters from other books as long as they acted consistently. I knew it would take a fair bit of adapting. For one thing, Waiting on Amber took place in a Tasmanian town, where as Surfside High was set in Queensland. I couldn't see all my characters moving north, so I changed things about, renaming Dominic, Helen, Herrick, Amber and Sasha as Duncan, Debbie, Merrick, Linnet and Nicola. I left Peri with her original name. With a few other changes, a move to the school setting and the addition of some other characters, Peri was published. Initially, Peri had black hair cut in a square bob with a fringe, but the photographic cover showed a girl with brown crinkly hair, so I changed the description to match. The byline on the book reads Virginia Baxter and Sally Odgers. There are still a few copies kicking about. 

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Sally is Sally Odgers; author, manuscript assessor, editor, anthologist and reader. She runs http://www.affordablemanuscriptassessments.com and Prints Charming Books. (Sally is me, by the way, and I am lots of other things too, but these are the relevant ones for now.)

The goal for 2017 is to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. If you're an author, an aspiring author, a reader or just someone who enjoys windows into worlds, you might find this fun. The books are not in any special order, but will be assigned approximate dates, and pictures, where they exist. If you enjoyed a post, or want to ask about any of my books or my manuscript assessment service.