Free Books! And - Do You Find It Hard To Start Writing A New Series?
I'm still here! And some new free books are as well?
I meant to take a 'few days off' of posting since I'd done a few posts in a fairly short period of time. Unfortunately, I forgot to start counting again… anyway, the free books (and discounted too) are back!
I’m expanding this offer to include some sales offers as well. I’ve included The Withering Dawn here in the summer sale promotion at 99c, as well as The Dragon of Dire Verses in the Free Fantasy & SciFi promo below. (Most of you already have it, but if you don’t, here’s how to get it!)
Epic Sci-Fi & Fantasy - summer sale! - 102 books to choose from!
July: Free Fantasy & SciFi! - 45 free books to choose from!
Let’s count cilcks and see who wins! My bet’s on Faeries Don’t Forgive.
Starting A New Series After Finishing An Old One
I answered a question on Royal Road that curiously applied to my own situation in a way.
The writer asked about feeling burnout after writing about 9,000 words. While I’m not feeling burnout per se, I did slam headlong into something of a wall on the first go-round after finishing up Say Yes To The Princess. A previous swing at a series idea passed through a few different concept revisions before I shelved it for further development, and I started instead on the current sci-fi humor series that seems to be going well. So far, so good. So what?
Well, I asked about the writer’s problem—and it turned out that they had just completed a series of their own, just like I had. And just like me, she was experiencing some difficulty making progress with the same expediency she had before as well.
Starting Over Again
I postulated that the reason it’s easy to get stuck early in a new series after concluding an old one was because you’re starting over from scratch with everything. The fastest book I ever wrote cover to cover was A Chaos of Couriers (And Faeries, Too!), which took me 21 days to get to a final draft.
This version of the cover came much later, but the book itself came pretty quickly!
That’s pretty quick. But there was a good reason for it. By then, I’d gotten a pretty good idea of who the characters were, how they interacted with each other, and how they would react differently to circumstances as they came up. Bardly and Elphyra had their banter going. The increasingly annoying Sir Cedric kept finding himself slotted into various roles of escalating importance (and incompetence). Princess Penelope found new things to get huffy about. And so on.
So by the time I got to writing that book, the process was simply a matter of conducting the events in question as they occurred, making sure they all fit together and made sense, and letting the characters do their thing without interrupting them. Compared to building out a new world, that’s easy.
It’s Totally Normal, Don’t Worry About It
By the time you’re done with a whole series—in my case, ten—it can be hard to remember exactly how much work it was developing those characters and relationships in the first place. So when you have to start all that over again, it feels like you’re not making progress in the way you’re used to. Well, you aren’t. And that’s pretty normal, because you’ve forgotten all the work you had to put in in order to get that little universe spinning the way it ought to.
So just keep after it, and remember that the first novel especially is a building phase. You’ve got a lot to build when you start from book one in a new setting, and that takes time and effort. And it’s effort you’ll want to put in, because your first book in a series is always going to be the most read one—but until you remember that it’s going to be extra work in the first place, it can be frustrating when you think about how easy it was to write new stories using your existing characters.
Here’s another way to look at it—if you aren’t convinced that it’s easy to get stuck on the first book in a series because of the extra work it takes to build new characters and relationships, think about how many would-be authors start with fanfiction. After all, that’s writing one can do without having to build a world, characters or relationships.
In short: if you’re stuck on a first book of a new series you want to write, the reason might very well be that you’ve forgotten about all the work you did to build your last series, and now your progress feels painfully slow. Your first book in a series will probably be the most work you put into any of the books in your series. So it’s perfectly normal—and that means, don’t panic.
Here it is in 8-bit.
See you soon—and sooner next time than this time. As I mentioned, I lost track of exactly how long it’d been since I updated everyone, so thanks for sticking around!