But . . . Now What??

As you might have guessed from my lack of posting last week, I finished the first draft of Blood Ties.

Blows horn, breaks out the confetti.

It feels great to get that monkey off my back, but at the same time it’s a little sad. I’ve been working on this book for a long time and it’s the final instalment in this series. Despite the fact that I started the Ardraci Elementals first, I had the idea for Moonstone Chronicles long before that. And yes, I knew from the beginning it was going to be a trilogy.

Now comes the real work – editing this sucker. Believe it or not, I’m looking forward to it. When you’re a pantser (someone who writes by the seat of their pants instead of following a rigid outline) you’re always coming up with ideas for things that could happen earlier in your book. And I had lots of these ideas that I want to go back and incorporate.

Anyway, I thought I’d take this time to reflect on some of the things I’ve learned whilst writing a book series, just in case someone reading this cares to give it a whirl. :-D

The first thing you want to do is figure out if your story idea can handle being more than one book. Some ideas can, some ideas can’t. While I’ve had stand alone story ideas come to me, most of them have been for multiple books. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Then you need to figure out if you’re writing a trilogy or a series. A trilogy is a story told in three, connected parts and you really don’t want to read these parts out of order. However, bear in mind that unless you’re planning on releasing all three books at the same time, your readers are going to forget a lot of went on in the previous instalment so you might want to jog their memory in the beginning of the second and third books.

A series is an interconnected story spread over multiple volumes. While the story is still told in chronological order, each volume has its own resolution and can often be read out of order. The same characters can be featured in each one, or other characters may take the spotlight with previous characters having only a minor part. But they’re all working toward the ultimate goal of the final volume

Next you need to map out the plot. I know, I know, strange advice coming from a die-hard pantser, but here’s the thing. You’ll save yourself a lot of headaches in the long run if you know where your story is going. This goes for a series as well as a trilogy.

When I started An Elemental Wind I was writing it for fun in response to a challenge to write a novel and serialize it on my blog. I’m not sure when, exactly, it happened, but I suddenly found myself really enjoying the story and making the decision to write more elemental stories.

At that point we knew the alien race the Illezie were searching for “the One,” and that was a thread that carried through to the other books, but it wasn’t until the second or third book I figured out why and what it meant to the story. It would have been really nice to know this in the beginning so I could have incorporated this information earlier. I ended up having to do some fancy explaining in the last book.

My final piece of advice: keep a notebook. I wish I had. In it you can keep track of characters, plot points, myths you might have created, little things than might be important later in the story. This is especially handy for the editing process. Instead of scrolling through a document or previous volume to find the information you’re looking for, you can just flip through your notebook.

That’s my two cents worth, but if you’d like some more tips for writing a trilogy or series, try NY Book Editors or Now Novel.

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Wordage Report

Seeing as all my time and words (around 5,000 of them) were spent on Blood Ties last week, there’s not much else to report. And all my goals (other than finishing Blood Ties) were pretty much a failure as well.

Goals For This Week:

So . . . Blood Ties is done.

*looks around, whistling aimlessly*

I have no clue what I’m going to work on next. It’s always best to let a story sit for a few days before editing. Maybe I’ll start the edits on An Elemental Spirit while I’m waiting for Blood Ties to cool down.

Or maybe I’ll start editing some of those stories I keep saying I’m going to edit.

Or maybe both!

Other than that, I’ll try to get the rest of my blog posts done this week, and on time. ;-)

And there’s what I’ll be up to. How about you?