[— Karen Myers —]

I’ve never before delayed releases of entries in a new series, but for experimental marketing reasons (first 3 all at once) I’m doing that now. Add in some significant life-event delays, and I’ve now had a couple of years to mentally mull over the first two finished books in vast detail, not as a re-write issue in themselves (e.g., plot), but as a world-building and character development issue.

Now, beefing up the world-building with much more specificity of detail is a relatively simple edit pass, and I have a file of developed notes that will drive that. That’s easy, and I could have done that at any time.

But, much more importantly, this has given me time to really understand who the characters are, what their hidden drives are, their hidden behind-the-scenes motivations, the hand of external politics and power, and so forth. My relatively young and naive hero is not alive to most of this when he starts (of course), but then neither was I. All of my characters, especially the secondary team players, have downright blossomed with real-world complexity (in my head), and I can feel the enrichment flowing not only into the light editing of the completed books that will result but into the rough sketches of several of the following entries, complete with plot implications.

For my earlier series, I didn’t have this luxury of delay — the characters went on the page as I envisioned them, richly enough, but they could only develop from there, no matter how much I learned about them in the process of writing each entry — no going back for a do-over expansion. This was one of the reasons I deliberately restricted myself to two 4-book series before tackling this indefinite length continuing series — my suspicion that I had a lot to learn about the really long form was correct.

There are limits — I will release once book 3 is done rather than leave the earlier entries malleable for longer, but I’ve learned so much about what is possible… There won’t be much actual impact of character insights on the two already-written books — a few words, here and there to seed the ground, no plot differences to shoe-horn in — but the whole thing will be much much richer soil moving forward, now that I have a better idea of what my cast is really up to.

As a bonus, I expect my increased depth-of-understanding in the characters to also constrain some of the inevitable new-character-bloat that a long series is subject to, by giving me more options to assign plot-driving responsibilities onto richer existing characters, rather than new ones.

This is not an economic or efficient approach to writing really long form, but since the delay was to some degree forced upon me, I can only be grateful for the harvest it produces.

If you write series, how happy are you with your original character concepts, now that you’ve gotten to know them better? How do you accommodate any discordance moving forward?