Series

It’s interesting writing a series of books. I guess for some it will happen as it happens. For me it was the opposite. Whilst I started with the first book on its own, then added the second and third, which happen concurrently, I soon realised that I could make the series longer.

At the time I had a number of other stories that would’ve been stand alone. However, I decided to incorporate them into the series using the same main character as the first one. When I began to work through their connections, I had to deal with a few problems of integration. As I wanted to follow a particular style, I then had to work out the basic over-story. The story line that connected all the preliminary sections of each of the books. Didn’t that make it more difficult for me.

From my earlier posts you may have worked out that I try to do what’s called NaNoWriMo (or NaNo for short) each November. NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. A challenge to write 50000 words of a novel in 30 days. That breaks down to 1667 per day. So, one NaNo, I spent the time fully developing the over story for my series of books. As a result of that challenge, I reduced the series from fourteen books to nine. So far I have been able to amalgamate two stories into one three of out of the five times with a couple more to negotiate.

NaNo 2019 is one of those amalgamated stories, book five. I have set that up to work on in November. As usual I make things hard for myself. Whilst I’m waiting for November 1, I have begun to write the story after that one, book six. I’m not doing too badly with 9500 words written in fifteen scenes to date. When November 1 comes around, that will go on the back burner (if not finished) until book five is done. Then once that’s edited, I need to incorporate any forecast into book six that I hadn’t counted on. I also have to back-write stuff I’ve included into book six into book five as it’s implied an event has taken place that still has ripple effects. Like I said, I don’t make it easy on myself.

My goal is to write, edit, update, edit, update (as many times as needed) each of the nine books and when they’re ready find someone to either deep edit, or at least beta read for me. being a linked series, I want to make sure that everything flows well and continuity is maintained. I can’t go espousing to other writers the importance of continuity (for one) and not ensure it’s clean in my own writing.

So, happy writing. Happy editing. Happy brain drain to me until December 1.