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Posts Tagged ‘sequels’

The Problem of the Middle Book

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 12, 2013| 3 Comments »

Did you ever notice that the middle book (or movie) in a series is usually the least exciting? It just feels like there’s something missing. I have a theory about that.

This applies to all lengths of series in which there’s some overall conflict tying the whole series together, but, for the sake of brevity, let’s use the trilogy.

In the first book, we, as readers, meet the characters for the first time. We “see” the setting for the first time. Hopefully (so that we’ll want to continue the series) we fall in love. If it’s a fantasy, we also learn about the magic system, about any strange and wonderful creatures that inhabit this world. It’s all new and sparkling and full of wonder.

In the third book, we have the big bang, the ultimate confrontation between the hero and the villain. The villain gets his come-uppance. The hero emerges victorious. We get the resolution, the satisfaction, of finding out how the story ends.

The poor middle book doesn’t have either one of these. Hopefully, it’s at least a decent story in its own right, but not always. I’ve read series in which the middle book doesn’t even come out to a story, in the sense of having a smaller problem recognized in the beginning and resolved at the end. It’s just a bridge between the first and third books. I have to really love the characters to want to come back for more in those cases.

This is something I’m really struggling with right now with BLOOD IS THICKER, which is the middle book of my CHIMERIA trilogy. The three books are each meant to stand alone, but they also build on each other and there is something of an overarching problem. BLOOD IS THICKER suffers from middle-book syndrome. And I’m not quite sure how to fix it. Yet.

Now, I want to mention one series that spectacularly beat the middle-book blues–J. K. Rowling’s HARRY POTTER series. And I think I know why. She parcels out that sense of wonder all through the books, especially the early ones. In SORCERER’S STONE we learn about the wizarding world, Diagon Alley, Hogwarts, Quidditch, baby dragons, unicorns, and centaurs. But in CHAMBER OF SECRETS we get the flying car, the whomping willow, giant spiders, a “talking” diary, a phoenix, and the basilisk. In PRISONER OF AZKABAN we get dementors, hippogriffs, werewolves, time-turners, the Marauders’ Map, and the patronus charm. Do I even have to go into GOBLET OF FIRE?

Now, if I could just figure out how to apply that to BLOOD IS THICKER. I think I have a better chance with the sequels to MAGE STORM.

Also, new chapters of FIRE AND EARTH and BLOOD WILL TELL are available on wattpad.

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Types of Series

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 9, 2013| 2 Comments »

I’m currently working on the sequel to BLOOD WILL TELL, and waiting for feedback on MAGE STORM, which I hope will be the first of a series. Therefore, I’ve been thinking about series and some of the problems of series and sequels.

First, I identify four different kinds of series, which have different issues.

  1. The multi-volume story: This kind is (unfortunately, to my way of thinking) particularly common in fantasy. It’s the story that isn’t complete (framed by the recognition of a problem and the resolution of that problem) until you read the whole series. Probably the most famous of these is LORD OF THE RINGS. The individual volumes do not come out to be stories (by the definition given above). You have to read all three before the problem recognized in volume one (THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING) is resolved in volume three (THE RETURN OF THE KING). Other examples are David Eddings’ THE BELGARIAD and THE MALLOREAN. And, probably the biggest of all time, Robert Jordan’s WHEEL OF TIME.  These series can be great fun when all the volumes are out–and extremely frustrating when the reader has to wait a year or more between installment. Also, speaking personally, THE WHEEL OF TIME demonstrated that there is a limit to the number of volumes I’m willing to read before I get some resolution.
  2. The multi-arc series: This is perhaps the tightest form of series and needs the most organization on the part of the writer. Each book in this kind of series has its own completed story, but is also part of a larger story arc that unites all of the books in the series. HARRY POTTER is probably the best example of this. Each book has a separate problem, but also advances the overall story. For example, in HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS, Harry and his friends have to figure out what and where the chamber is, what’s in it, who’s opened it, and ultimately defeat both the monster and its master. That’s a story. But, there are also things in that book which don’t directly advance that quest, but have to do with the larger story of Harry’s struggle against Lord Voldemort.
  3. The protagonist-centered series. There are a lot of examples of this, but one of the simplest is any mystery series that centers around a particular detective. That protagonist is all these series have in common. It doesn’t matter–or matters very little–what order you read the books in. They’re all different, and usually distinct, adventures of the protagonist. Sometimes, it’s a setting or fantasy world, that’s featured instead of a main character.
  4. The stories-that-build-on-each-other series: (Okay, that’s a long and awkward name for it.) This is the series in which each book is a complete story in its own right. There is no overarching conflict that unifies all the books. But the stories do build on each other so that there is a preferred reading order. Patricia Briggs’s MERCY THOMPSON series, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, and John Flanagan’s RANGER’S APPRENTICE are all examples of this.

As for me, my series tend to fall in that last category. It’s probably not an accident that this is also the kind of series I like to read most. Though, if I ever get back to it, THE SHAMAN’S CURSE is more of the second type, with an overarching conflict unifying the three (or possibly four) stories in the series.

I’ll be back on Wednesday with more thoughts on the problems with writing series.

Meanwhile, new chapters of FIRE AND EARTH and BLOOD WILL TELL are available on wattpad. Both stories are also available in their entirety on Amazon and elsewhere e-books are sold.

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Revisiting Old Stories

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on June 2, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Well, having closed (for now) the first draft of MAGIC AND POWER, and not being quite ready yet to start in on my “Weird Oz” story, I’m currently going back through some of my older stories.

MAGE STORM, after a rework, is ready to go out to critiquers. I’d really like to get this one off the ground because I have ideas for at least three sequels. I want to go play in this sandbox again.

Meanwhile, I’m working my way through the manuscript of BLOOD IS THICKER, which is the sequel to BLOOD WILL TELL, reminding myself what I like about this story and what things still need work before it’ll be ready to e-publish. My original target for this one was a little over six months ago, but it just hasn’t been ready. I’d like to make it by this autumn.

It’s fun to have a reason to go back through these stories and remember what I love about them and the characters. Especially the characters. My frustrated half-werewolf, now married to a dragon. My well-meaning dragon who just can’t quite overcome his protective instincts. My cluelessly naive unicorn-girl. And that’s just in BLOOD IS THICKER. This story was meant just to have fun with.

Wednesday will by my review of A CHANGE OF PLANS by my awesome Pied Pipers critique partner, Donna K. Weaver. Isn’t that cover gorgeous?

Meanwhile, new chapters of FIRE AND EARTH and BLOOD WILL TELL are up on wattpad.

 

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Revisions (Again)

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , on May 12, 2013| 2 Comments »

My current WIP, MAGIC AND POWER, is on temporary hold while I work through a particularly difficult spot in the revisions of my middle grade fantasy, MAGE STORM. The tricky spot is because I’m taking a section that originally had only two characters and revising it to include three characters. There are so many more possibilities for a bit of conflict between the good guys when there are three of them rather than only two. I think it will ultimately work better, but that doesn’t make it easy. Especially when I’m trying to be very careful about adding too much to the word count.

I love MAGE STORM. Always did. Here’s the pitch (which will need more work):

Like everyone else, Rell believes that magic died along with its users at the end of the Great Mage War. All that’s left are the violent, semi-sentient mage storms made up of the ashes of the magic users killed in the war. Then he’s caught in a mage storm and infected with magic he doesn’t know how to control. Rell must find someone who can help him learn to deal with this gift for his own safety and that of everyone around him. If he can’t, that fire he accidentally started in the barn will be nothing compared to what the magic will do to him. If he succeeds, Rell could begin healing the damage caused by the war and ending the mage storms forever.

I’ve already got ideas for three sequels to this one, more trouble that Rell and his friends can get into.

Of course, that’s never all I’m working on.

Don’t forget FIRE AND EARTH. (I have to find time to do some more promotion for this one.)

Fire And Earth Cover (Provisional)

As always, new chapters of FIRE AND EARTH and BLOOD WILL TELL are up on wattpad.

Oh, and I finally figured out how to do the European 4 in 1 chain mail pattern:

European 4-1

Happy Mother’s Day everyone!

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Where Do Stories Come From?

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on February 10, 2013| 4 Comments »

Well, the truth is, they come from all over, all the time. Some examples:

THE BARD’S GIFT:

I belong to a couple of online writers’ forums. On one of them, Hatrack River Writers Workshop, members will occasionally post challenges. You don’t win anything when you win a challenge, other than bragging rights. The real point is the feedback, because one of the rules is always that all the entrants have to comment on each others’ work or be disqualified. Sometimes, these challenges center around a prompt. It’s fascinating to see how many different stories can be created from the same prompt. The problem for me is usually the relatively small word count allowed.

Well, one of these prompts was “Slave to the flame” and a story came to me about a little dragon that was the first to figure out how to breathe fire. I wrote it as a fable. It also ended badly, partly because of the prompt, but also partly because I didn’t have enough room to develop it further. When the challenge was over, I had no idea what to do with that story. Eventually, I wrote another story around it (also called “The Bard’s Gift”), about the girl who was telling this fable and why.

And then I started wondering other things about this girl. How did she come to be in that position? Why did she have this gift for telling stories? Where were they? This led to a lot of research and eventually an 80,000-word alternate history that includes dragons (but not the same ones in the original story), Norse gods, and thunderbirds. The short story “The Bard’s Gift” is now Chapter 35 of the novel, THE BARD’S GIFT.

MAGE STORM:

There’s a similar story to MAGE STORM. It also started as a response to a challenge on Hatrack, this time the prompt was the title of a Writer’s of the Future winning story “Cinders of the Great War”. That gave me an idea about the aftermath of a war in which all the mages had destroyed each other.  That short story, “Infected With Magic” (I had to change the title because Writers of the Future has to be anonymous) got an Honorable Mention in Writers of the Future.

I still have never found what I consider a satisfying ending to that story, though. It always felt like the beginning of something bigger. And so it was, a middle grade adventure fantasy MAGE STORM. I mean to get back to my latest revision to this story again soon and get it back out there.

UNTITLED:

But not all ideas come from writing prompts. Some come from news stories or photographs that send my imagination flying. One particular idea that isn’t quite ripe yet, came from me just wondering.

At the time, I’d recently read one too many stories in which the female protagonist did very little but wait around for some guy to take the lead and help her. I have an allergically strong reaction to those stories–as in pitch the book across the room strong. I’m okay with a female main character needing some help once, maybe twice. After that, she’d better either figure out how to keep herself out of trouble or how to deal with it herself.

So, as I was driving around running perfectly normal errands, I started wondering to myself: under what conditions would it be all right for a female protagonist to need some help? What if that character was dropped into a strange world (like Dorothy landing in Oz) and really has no way to know what’s dangerous and what’s not? What if, in this world, things that we tend to think of as sort of fuzzy, cute, and nice (unicorns, pixies, etc.) are really the most dangerous. And some things we think of as evil, the ones you’d want to avoid, are really the only ones that might help you? Okay, in that situation, Dorothy might need a little help to gether started.  Look for this story maybe this time next year.

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A Look Back

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 29, 2012| 3 Comments »

Well, it’s that time of the year. Time to look back and see what was–or wasn’t–accomplished in the last year and declare goals for next year. I’ll do the first in this post and blog about next years goals in my next post, which will actually be next year.

The full post of my goals for 2012 is here.

Teen and Young Adult Fiction

   Writing goals:

  1. BLOOD WILL TELL was e-published during 2012. It’s original cover wasn’t very good, which I’m sure affected sales. It has a new and much better cover now.
  2. I did query MAGE STORM during 2012, but I currently have it torn apart for revisions with the help of a very thorough critique partner. I expect to give it another go in 2013. I believe in this story. Plus, I have at least three potential sequels for it that I’d like to write.
  3. SEVEN STARS, which is now titled FIRE AND EARTH, has also been queried. It got chosen as first alternate in Pitch Wars this month and I’m waiting for the feedback from my mentor so I can make revisions and see what happens.
  4. MAGIC’S FOOL will never get beyond first draft, I’m sorry to say. I learned in this year’s WriteOnCon that the age of my protagonist is poison. Too old for middle grade and not old enough for young adult. I can’t make him any younger, so I’ll give the story a rewrite as young adult, including material that was planned for the sequel (MAGIC’S APPRENTICE), possibly in 2013.
  5. Keep writing. This was an unqualified success. I finished three drafts of THE BARD’S GIFT, which is now ready for readers in a few days.

As for the personal goals, well, let’s just say I did better with my writing.

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Progress Report

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on November 11, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Just a quick progress report today.

I’m trying to finish up the second draft of BLOOD IS THICKER, now about 98% complete. It’s that last two percent, which is actually turning into a new chapter, that’s taking the time.

Then I want to concentrate on finishing the second draft of THE BARD’S GIFT, now about 40% complete. I’ve got this scheduled for first readers in January and it’ll need at least a couple more passes after I finish the second draft before it’s ready for them.

This month, I also want to get to revisions on at least one of the three shorter works that need some revision, specifically my novelette, “Becoming Lioness”, which I want to e-publish in December.

Meanwhile, I’m still querying FIRE AND EARTH.

I also need to dedicate some time to figuring out marketing. I want to do a lot better job with “Becoming Lioness”. That’ll require some preparation and coordination this time around.

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NaNoWriMo

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , on November 4, 2012| 1 Comment »

November is National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo for short or sometimes just NaNo. Thousands of people commit to write 50,000 words in a month or an average of 1667 words a day. They virtually disappear from any other writing communities for the duration. November is a very slow month on most writers’ forums.

I have never done NaNoWriM0–and no, I’m not doing it this year either. I don’t feel I need to. I proved to myself a few years ago that I can, in fact, write a novel in that space of time if the story is ripe and ready to be written. BLOOD WILL TELL was actually the first novel that was like that for me. It’s a heady feeling when a story comes together that way and writing it feels like opening a spigot and just letting it flow out onto the page (or the screen). But the truth is not all novels flow like that. And, even when they do, when a story is ready to just pour out, you have to write it while it’s hot or risk losing it (been there, done that, too). Somehow, those times when the story is just ripe for the picking never seem to happen in November for me.

In any case, I’m pretty firmly stuck in revisionville this November. I’m working on the second drafts of both BLOOD IS THICKER (about 90% done) and THE BARD’S GIFT (about 33% done). I also have three short stories that need revisions–“Becoming Lioness”, “The Seeker”, and one I can’t tell you the title of because, if I ever get back to it and find a better ending, it may be my next Writers of the Future entry. That one could use some polish but what it really needs is a good ending that doesn’t feel like it just sort of fades off into the sunset.

I expect to go back to writing a first draft at the beginning of next year. I’ve got a few stories brewing in the back of my head to choose from. Will it be the story I already have outlined (and I never do outlines)? Or the shiny new idea that twists all kinds of fantasy staples around and sets them on their heads? Or the fairy-tale retelling? I’ll have to wait and see what’s calling to me when I get there.

So, to all my writer friends out there who are doing NaNo: good luck. And I look forward to hearing from you and reading some of your novels on the other side.

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From Romance to Capers

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 24, 2012| 4 Comments »

My last post was about rereading Lois McMaster Bujold’s A CIVIL AFFAIR to help me work out some of the kinks in the romance part of my paranormal romance BLOOD IS THICKER. I’m still working on BLOOD IS THICKER, though I’m in the last quarter, now and my focus has shifted.

Now I’m working on a little mini-caper plot point. In this case, I haven’t read or re-read anything exactly. I’ve relied more on this episode of Writing Excuses. This caper will only last through a couple of chapters, but hopefully adds a bit of action and suspense to the story leading up to the action surrounding the final resolution.

This is something new for me. I’ve written action scenes before, but never tried anything resembling a caper before. I’m sure that this will need more tweaking in the next draft. That’s okay. It’s good to try new things and stretch yourself a bit.

Meanwhile, I’ve also started the second draft of THE BARD’S GIFT, which is a young adult alternate history. It’s interesting to be working on two such different stories at the same time. We’ll see how that works out, too.

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Reading as Research

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 21, 2012| 2 Comments »

As I’ve been working through the first round of revisions to BLOOD IS THICKER, I’ve also been rereading parts of A CIVIL CAMPAIGN by Lois McMaster Bujold. Not just because it’s my favorite of the Vorkosigan Saga books, though it is. Also because it’s a good model for how a smart man can blow up his own love life–and then fix it again by realizing his own mistake.

That’s one of the things that happens in BLOOD WILL TELL, although obviously in a very different way, and it didn’t come off quite right in the first draft. It was too flat and a bit stereotypical. So, how to fix it. Well, it never hurts to try to pick up pointers from somebody who handled a similar situation extremely well.

I think I’ve made it better. It still may need some tweaking, but that’s what revisions are for.

BTW, I’ve finally built up some momentum in this one. I’ve passed the half-way point in this revision. Yay!

That’s good, because I’m very soon going to have three revision projects going at once:

  1. The ongoing revisions to MAGE STORM as critiques come in.
  2. BLOOD IS THICKER
  3. And the start of the first round of revisions to THE BARD’S GIFT.

And that doesn’t count three (soon to be four) short stories that need some attention.

Well, at least I know I won’t get stuck. I’ll always be able to switch to something else if I do.

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