Brian Trenchard-Smith's Blog

Here's some backstory on the evolution of ALICE THROUGH THE MULTIVERSE. I woke from a vivid dream, in which a girl in medieval times is fleeing from pursuers in a raging thunderstorm. Suddenly she wakes up in a 21st century psychiatric institution. Is she insane, or is she really from another time? That was all I could remember, but the idea intrigued me as a movie project. I would go swimming at the UCLA pool each day, and more ideas for characters and plot would occur to me. As a writer I find exercise not just helpful but essential. Finally a screenplay was finished under the title of The Executioner's Daughter. It got optioned twice for good money. But unless I could get Keira Knightly or Scarlett Johansson or a young star of equivalent box office wattage to sign on for the lead role, I could not get a studio interested. So the project languished. I put it aside, but it still kept gnawing at my liver. It's a ripping yarn that people would enjoy. Eventually I decided to turn it into a novel. No publishing house was interested in a new author. So I self published it as The Headsman's Daughter in 2016, and got 22 great reviews. (You can find them on my Amazon author page). But I made a mistake with my marketing approach in a very niche-oriented book world. Firstly The Headsman's Daughter was too esoteric a title. What's a Headsman? Well, it was a speed bump to many potential readers. I compounded this error with a hard action front cover. The book does have action and violence, but it is much more concerned with suspense, and peeling back the layers of the mystery that is Alice. It also deals with time travel, medieval history, religion, political corruption past and present with a good deal of ironic humor.
An author's website told me my "Ozploitation" marketing approach (for want of a better term) misrepresented a more sophisticated work, and coupled with the title was excluding a much wider readership; young adults, sci-fi fans of time travel and alternate history. So I decided to add three more chapters to the ending, taking Alice's story to a new dimension and republish as Alice Through The Multiverse. (Thank you, Lewis Carroll) I am proud of the result. The book has more heft now. Alice Through The Multiverse is still a wacky roller coaster ride but it has a point now. The last three pages will certainly spark some debate.