The Jitter Girls

Ah, the Jitter Girls.

They’re quite scary, you know. Scary and unstoppable. Or maybe more creepy than scary. But unstoppable. Definitely unstoppable.

I came up with the Jitter Girls as part of a script that never got made. In fact, it was this same script in which I came up with the idea for the Cleavers, as well. That script had a whole load of ideas, but unfortunately it just wasn’t very good. All these madcap ideas didn’t cohere into anything resembling sense, so I abandoned the script and started cannibalising my own stuff, taking what worked and using it somewhere else.

Which is why I’m writing about the Jitter Girls, ten years after coming up with them.

January was, basically, a month writing various short stories and whatnot. I had reached the halfway point of Book Six, and was quite comfortable with taking a few weeks off to get some other work done. Well, now I’m back at it, and I needed a new threat for the middle section and I was searching through this magnificent mind of mine and those creepy ol’ Jitter Girls just jumped right out at me.

I knew I’d get to use them, sooner or later.

I’m not going to tell you much about them, other than that they are currently giving Skulduggery and Valkyrie quite a hard time. I haven’t a clue how they’re going to be defeated, either. The way I’m writing right now, it looks like the Jitter Girls are going to kill our heroes and skip off into the darkness. Which, you know, would be bad for the rest of the book.

Oh dear. I seem to have written myself into a proverbial corner.

I should probably get back to work.