The way to make it big — or at least to make a living — in indie seems to be series. Well, to an extent it was the way to make a living in traditional, too, only there you were limited by the fact that when you were well into your 10 book series — say, five books — suddenly the house had a memgrim and you had to drop it and btw change your name. Allegedly!
Not that I’m bitter. Unfortunately it left me with a lot of series whose fans want me to continue them all, and I’ve been nibbled to death by ducks cats for several months.
Okay it probably needs something more serious than nibbles for a fricking main water line replacement, and oh, yeah, my main shower still doesn’t work, not that I mind traipsing through the house au naturel early morning (yes I do) to shower downstairs. (I mean, there’s no one to see us but the cats, but I’m scarring Indy for life. The horror! The horror!)
Anyway, moving right along, along this wall, Barbie dolls, high heels, and medieval torture devic– Oh, right. Series.
So, the point is, the way to make money is to have a series, particularly a long, long running series.
There is a reason for this. I find myself preferring series, and the longer the better, because finding something I really like to read is work (eh. Part a lot of meh, part I’m really picky, okay. And it depends on the mood I’m in, too) and once I find it, I want to not have to do it again for a week or so at, say, a book a day.
And the sad thing, at least for me, is that even when I adore one series from one author, the others are often meh. I know other people aren’t like that. This is a me problem.
But at the same time series are a problem — also as a reader, but also as a writer, later — because I don’t think there are only three series that I haven’t gone cold on. At least in everything outside mystery.
I haven’t really gone cold on Dresden, yet, but I’d like him to bring the series to a place where the characters are upright and locked and then move on, since I heard rumors that’s his plan. But I’d rather he not move on living Thomas in monster-prison. Yes, I know he’s a vamp– Okay, moving on.
I read the Repairman Jack series onto the very end, and now I think about it, I want to read it again.
The only author that I read every series (though they were all in the same universe) and never ran cold was Terry Pratchett.
So — you’ll ask — why do I run cold on most series though not — with one exception — mystery?
Mostly because they change. They become something other than the series I really liked. Some people complain of that with Dresden and Pratchett, but they remain enough “what I like” to keep me coming back.
OTOH the one mystery series I dropped COLD, the author had the character do something in one book that totally broke the unstated premise of the series. (That the character was a good if misguided person.) The author walked it back, mind you, but it was too late. I tried to get back into the series, but the character was now broken, and I kept expecting to be sucker punched again.
Mystery series are usually less risky for this type of loss of interest, because they are “Serial, not evolving.”
Let me explain: I love Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries. Always have. And while there are things that change — cast of associates for one — and things that refer to earlier books, mostly the novels are the same.
They live in the same house. The two main characters are the same and seemingly ageless. Nobody is born, nobody dies, nobody marries. (Sure, a friend dies, and one of Wolfe’s employees, but not Wolf or Goodwin or the personnel in the house.) And the structure of the novel is more or less the same every time: A client shows up. Archie wants to take the case, Wolfe doesn’t. The case is engaged and goes badly, to the point they’re considering dropping it. Wolfe come sup with a clever plan, which doesn’t work as planned, but unlocks something else, etc.
There are variations, of course, but going back into that series is much like having my favorite meal. Sure, sometimes I want something other than rare steak, but when I come back to it, I know what to expect, and why mess with perfection.
Most fantasy or science fiction series aren’t that way — though weirdly that’s what I originally intended to do with the Shifter series, after the first/set up book. It didn’t work out that way, and it will be even less so, in the future, for no reason having to do with the timing of writing it.
Most science fiction and fantasy series are more under the guise of a very long book or occasionally a semi-structured space opera.
Things change during the course of it. People age. People die, people are born, and because of continuous tests, the main character changes a lot.
And at some point, I go cold.
Like I could take it or leave it.
But I do understand why series change, from the other side. As a writer.
For instance, I can’t do shifters the way I’d planned. To some extent, I couldn’t anyway. The main characters do fall in love, get married, have a baby.
But more importantly, the series was in hiatus for far too long, and when I came back, I had to make it different enough to be interested again. I had to make it …. something I would like to write now.
I had to find my way back into the world that had been locked to me years ago.
So, Shifters is spinning off to Ragnarok which actually means something in shifter land.
And Darkship? Well, yes, there are more coming, but after the next non-Athena — Hacking The Storm, Fuse’s tale — and the next Athena Darkship Defiance, I’m spinning off the Kit and Thena story, and advancing probably 10 to 20 years, into the next generation. Because the scope of the world demands it. Kit and Thena will still be there, but they’re very much established and more guides than heroes, if that makes sense.
Dyce, OTOH, stays Dyce. Oh, sure, she gets married and has another kid, but the insanity is still the insanity.
And while I can foresee — if I live long enough — a time when E. and his little brother leave the house, and Dyce settles down to wait for grandkids, mostly Dyce remains Dyce. Time cannot temper her insanity, and age will not make her more cautious.
So, there’s that.
Note I’m not including in series the “limited run” that you know is going to be three books or five books, or six books. Those are more like a really long book than a series. (And I have a few of those planned too.)
What are your particular difficulties with series as readers and writers? And how do you get around “going cold” on a series?
Mad Genius Club 
96 responses to “Serial”
I grew up reading series. I read a lot of Dragonlance in high school, and the Wheel of Time, and (my main reading love, although it is a bit childish, I know) comic books, particularly X-Men back in the 80s and 90s. With Dragonlance I think I just got too old to enjoy them. I think it’s a great starter series for kids, but when I re-read the first two books, oh, five years or so ago I couldn’t get back into it.
With Wheel of Time, I was hooked in high school and was able to read the first 6 or 7 without interruption. I read the next two as they came out but then I moved to Japan and Robert Jordan died and I started reading stuff people said were classics. I’ve liked a lot of it but those were not series.
With comic books, pretty much everything is a series, whether it’s ongoing or mini (or maxi, like Marvel liked to call their 12-issue series back in the day). With those, going cold is absolutely unavoidable. It was highly unusual for a writer/artist team to stay on a book for more than a year (and it’s pretty remarkable that Chris Claremont stayed on X-Men for 17 years, although he had a revolving door for artists), and somewhere around the turn of the millennium the big two (Marvel and DC) started structuring their series in six-issues story arcs so they could fit them nicely into trade paperbacks that fit on bookshelves in actual bookstores and are far easier to ship than floppy single issues through Amazon. I suppose it’s nice to be able to read an arc alone without having to invest in X years of history and continuity, but that was part of what I LOVED about older books (even when the writers and artists changed and the quality was uneven). Something that happened in X-Men 172 affected what happened in 259 (although there are plenty of instances of Claremont dropping threads when they did not work, and towards the end there were plenty of things left hanging that he just didn’t have time for).
You could follow a writer/artist team (or just a writer, or just an artist, since they do not always work in teams) but then you were jumping from series to series. And some artists pretty much only do covers. As for me, my comics are mostly 25+ years old (and I really only have DC stuff since 2000) (also I originally wrote “15+ years old” but holy shit it’s 2024 and the 90s were SO LONG AGO) so I followed the series I like until the 90s when everything seems to start falling apart. The series I like these days are the ones I write myself. I try to avoid having them be open-ended, as that’s part of the issue with American comic books. The Sensational Six ends when they graduate from high school. The Long Winter ends when they graduate college. I’ll do miniseries after that (I have ideas). My fantasy books I’m serializing, and honestly they probably read better that way. I wish I had more time to read other people’s work.
I know what you mean about loving one series from an author and disliking another. Maybe it’s the setting, or the characters; I don’t know. There is one author who writes three mystery series and I read all of them, but all the books/characters are very much alike though set in different cities.
As far as staying interested in a series, I will go with your Nero Wolfe example: I think world setting has a lot to do with it. Wolfe and Archie do stay the same, but the reader wants to hear Wolfe’s meal conversation, what books he is currently reading, what they had for dinner, to go with Archie to a baseball game… etc. That is half the fun of the books. And of course there are the rare occasions when Wolfe leaves the brownstone: the setting does change but we get to see Wolfe’s reaction, which is also fun.
I’m starting the final proofread of the last book in my Martha’s Sons series. I have to admit I’m kind of sad and will miss all these people. So, one last read through of book 6 before it goes live in March.
I’ve got people telling me to keep going. Until recently, it was easy to think, nope, not doing that. This is the perfect ending spot. Things put in place in book 1 are coming to fruition. Loose ends are tied off (lord, I hope so, think so, we’ll see). Arcs are completed both for the main story line and for the characters. (Some of them have had quite the educational time of it.)
Sure, I know what happens next in the universe in a big picture kind of way, but –and this is important–I had no plots! Hurray.
Then something terrible happened. Two, no three, plot bunnies showed up. I shooed them away, even as I took notes. Something else unlocked. I could write three more books. But I’m not going to.
You, see. I have this new world and a character who’s been waiting patiently for me to get to him, even though he’s only 18. I know all sorts of things that are going to happen. As a pantser, that’s huge. I’ve got to let this fellow live. The Dawes have had their turn. Now, Jack Darien gets to join the crowd in my head.
The plot bunnies are terrible this season.
Introduce the space barbarians to the glories of jugged plot bunny?
I wonder if they stormed the gate given how many folk were blocked up until recently.
As a reader, I hate to see a series end, but do want it to wrap up well before the main character breaks. A certain thing happened in the most recent Dresden (to someone not Harry) that made me feel something important got broken. I wasn’t happy.
Also, something else has become clear that has allowed me to say “I told you so,” to one of my sons. Although, of course, highly gratifying, it doesn’t make up for the creeping cold.
I think that action/adventure series work best when they are “Monster Of The Week” style.
I think Dresden held to that format from Fool Moon to White Night or thereabouts, when it morphed in more of a soap opera format. Charles Stross’ Laundry Files did something similar through The Nightmare Stacks, and Ben Aaronivitch’s Rivers Of London through Lies Sleeping.
Series seem to reach a point where the storyline changes from “How will the hero defeat THIS monster” to “What is happening in this ragtag band of monster hunters”, and that’s the point where I lose interest.
Mysteries, by virtue of the focus on solving one particular crime per book, I think are less subject to soap opera creep (although it happens on television–both NCIS and CSI ended up becoming General Hospital in time. And let’s not even talk about Supernatural.)
I really liked “The Laundry Files” as long as it was urban fantasy. Some of the amusing references to “Knuth Volume 4” were fun or the diversion into trying to make an omelet without breaking eggs. Unfortunately he decided to move on to bigger and badder enemies that did have an effect on the modern world which just got tedious. Character growth is a good thing, but constantly increasing the threats doesn’t always work.
The “Junkyard Druid” series was fun, but by the end the battles were getting too large. I am very glad that that series ended and a couple of related series have been spun off allowing the reset of the power levels of the bad guys.
I think it was _Buffy_ that convinced me to give up on a series when the main character dies more than twice. I don’t know what happened with _Supernatural_ because I stopped watching it after the main character died twice.
Oooh.
I find myself trying to find a gimmick that could make that a reasonable basis for a series.
On the other hand, Bleach made multiple deaths pretty well justified, and I would probably have been better off if I quit the second time Ichigo died, before the Soul Society arc.
On the gripping hand, there are xianxia that I probably would have regretted quitting at that point, but xianxia often have a pretty lax approach to death, and my taste for xianxia is also a bit weird.
This is why it’s a good thing to either have your main character on the move or situate him where the people about him are always changing. You can have a (tiny) core of stable characters, but you are bound to have an accumulating cast if you keep on having him meet new people and don’t have a way to have them exit stage left.
The best way to do an interminable series is:
Series is episodic. You have the beginning, middle, and end within each book, and the new book is a new story.
Main character does not have character arcs.
Neither do any other permanent characters.
Main character is on the move or (less good) in a situation where people are perpetually arriving and leaving. Those he meets are those who have character arcs, from meeting and interacting with him.
Main character is immortal. The fiction that a character can take a month to solve a mystery a hundred times in five years may let you get around that, but immortality is the easiest way around it. On the other hand, letting the character go through time does mean you have to be convincing about how time changes the world.
The Stephanie Plum books, many of which I’ve read, and I assume the Jack Reacher books from what people have said about them, fit the bill of “never changes, static type of story.” And the former are perfectly fine for what they are: popcorn books that I know will deliver a romance triangle, a blown-up or otherwise damaged car, and Stephanie being stupid and lucky.
Honestly, I think it’s harder to write those, because they’d get super boring after a while (as they do for a reader if that’s all you’re reading.) Which is why Evanovich has written in other series or stand alones.
From a romance reader/writer perspective, setting up series can be both easy and difficult, depending on how you do it. Small town setting, or a focus on a particular family (Seven brides for Severn Brothers, say) is doable, but in any subgenre other than contemporary, there’s going to be a whole lot of worldbuilding to sustain a series rather than a single book, and it won’t necessarily be a “can write a new book in the series whenever” kind of thing, either, at least if the characters are having an impact on the world.
Just in case you haven’t heard it, I feel like inflicting this on everyone.
NPR is doing a documentary on Alan Ritchson in the TV series “Reacher” versus Tom Cruise in the Jack Reacher movies. The title is “All Reachers Great and Small”
Reacher kicked me out in book 2? 3? the one with the evil militias. Bah. I lived through that time. The militias were in Clinton’s head and his excuse to ruthlessly suppress opposition.
Bah I said. <Dropped it from height.
Lillian Jackson Braun’s “Cat Who….” series had that familiarity. Kwilleran, the protagonist, inherited a massive fortune, so he has no money worries. He writes a column for the local paper, which gives him a reason for poking around. He has a comfortable long-term affair with the town librarian. And the mysteries follow a predictable format: some event is being planned in the city of Pickax or a neighboring town and Kwilleran is somehow drawn into it. Then something, usually a murder, happens…the gimmick is that Kwilleran’s Siamese tom appears to be psychic and offers him clues which he sometimes follows in time to do some good.
For whatever reason, the last book in the series sent the librarian to Paris, gave him a new potential girlfriend, burned down his house (an event which has nothing to do with anything else in the book and is never resolved though it’s presented as possible arson) and basically undercut the whole series. Makes me wonder if it was ghost-written (Braun allegedly had developed dementia) by someone who hoped to take it over and write it *her* way.
Oof! Yeah, as a 70 year old writer I’m both possessive of my characters and don’t want them to die with me. I’ve given permission to two people to write in the universe, and it’ll be interesting (or possibly horrifying!) to see their finished product.
yes.
Oh! I saw that in an author’s note of something. He mentioned an in-Uphoff-world work in progress. I meant to go look, but didn’t. Now I need to figure out who that was. It wasn’t that long ago and Goodreads tracks me; should be doable.
I stopped reading him when I realized that the murderer was always the successful business person. My older son was enamored of it till seven or so, though, so we bought all of them.
He was in it for the cats.
Not always. I remember one where the murderer was the quirky eccentric retired woman. She conveniently committed suicide by drug interaction, leaving a confession letter.
To be honest, I read them for the local color, but I haven’t gone back to them since Braun passed on. And mostly single reads, unlike Holmes or Wimsy or Ellery Queen or even Philo Vance.
I read ’em for Koko and the cool converted barn Kwill lives in IIRC, but it was a long time ago. I was teenaged/YA at the time. The evil businessperson trope seemed cliched even then.
She burned down the barn in the last book. It really did read although she (or a collaborator?) wanted to throw everything besides Kwill and the cats away and start over.
I think the family member who kept reading them told me about that and I was so appalled (“THEY BURNED THE BARN?!?!”) that I didn’t read it.
What did it for me was that, eventually, Braun reached the point where she didn’t really want to write mysteries any more. As Misha said above, “the storyline change[d] from ‘How will the hero [solve THIS mystery]’ to ‘What is happening in this [quirky town]?’” In the last book I read, Braun was so uninterested in the mystery that I don’t think we ever even learned the name of the victim. Qwill spent far more time writing about Yum Yum playing with a thimble than he did investigating the mystery.
I also started to dislike for Qwill, who seemed to have developed a Chelsea Clinton-like attitude: “I don’t care about money [because I have infinite amounts of it], and that makes me so much more virtuous than people who want to be paid for their work.”
He always had a bit of that smug journalist attitude and it seemed to get worse over time. A great rebuke to that attitude, from an unlikely source, in the movie The Aviator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br-ljup5Bow
This is why I bounce around genres, preventing my getting infinitely bored with one. now, for not being nibbled to death by… spins wheel crocodiles, and being able to write more….
I broke my big series . . . sort of. Book three . . . I’m not sure where my mind was when I wrote that! Can I blame menopause? Anyway, a glance at sales per book shows that I lose a lot of readers right there. I toned it down but it introduced too many important characters and sets up so many important “rules of the series” that I can’t just drop it. I may just put in a warning in the blurb.
As a counterpoint, here – I went “lukewarm” after the first book. Didn’t get back to you until I ran out of other new and interesting things.
Second book was “well, it’s worth keeping on with, unless something really good comes along elsewhere.”
It was after the third book that it became “now, I’m hooked, where’s the next one?” (Fortunately, by that time, there were quite a few “next ones.”)
I never saw any “breaking” of the series – it only got better.
I accidentally read the second book first and went “meh”. I saw “Exzy” (#50?) promoed on Hoyt, thought “somebody likes these”, gave it a try and was hooked. I went back to the first book and binged the entire series. Book 2 is still a low point. Black Goats is more fun even with the ick sections. It’s more of a roller coaster ride where I slide past the “ewww” parts.
The ‘problem’ with Black Goats is that it gored all the sacred magic cows.
You took the tropes and went to their logical ends, and, as anyone with the sense God gave little green apples could have predicted, those are horrifying logical ends.
Which is why I think it is a good book, and also, if literature professors read it, would be considered a literarily important book, but I also cut my under-eighteens off the series before that, and give a warning when they’re adults and continue.
People don’t like their sacred cows gored, and people don’t really like having to examine their preconceptions about a whole bunch of other stories, and Black Goats makes the reader think about every novel they’ve enjoyed that used those tropes and where that world would have actually gone to.
I’m changing both my current series drastically. but it’s that or not being able to write them.
I was a bit peeved with _Empire of the One_, which turned the evil bad guys into people. I ended up loving that entire sub-series. I’m still not terribly happy with the _Alliance_ books – even close up I don’t like those people. But I’ve read them all, so there is that. Since you keep bouncing into the bad guys’ perspective, I’m expecting some Earth centric books, eventually.
The first three books don’t quite fit with the others. A LOT of time passes quickly, whereas the others are more real-time. I don’t recall anything particularly troubling about book three, but it’s been a while. Amazon say, “Acquired on February 8, 2015.” I suppose the horny goats are not “young adult”, but I didn’t find it off-putting (weird, yes).
It shouldn’t bee too hard to fix: Search for “pizzle” and rewrite those sections. 🙂
BTW: When I searched My Content and Devices for “Uphoff”, Amazon also said, “Showing 1 to 25 of 96 items”. I think you’ve got the series thing pretty much nailed.
I’ve been reading Perry Mason books, and as a series they were incredibly long-running. 70 books? I was in desperate need of distraction last week and read six of them plus a ton of the Look Inside on others. The writing did change a bit from end to end. There was less of the granite-faced lawyer and “night changing the city’s skyscrapers from hard shafts of steel to wraithlike fingers etched in light”. But the relationship of Mason and his secretary did not change, quite specifically. Mason proposes to her — once that I read and, according to an essay, he does it four more times. She turns him down because it would change their relationship. And of course it would have totally changed the books. If he had married he’d have to spend some time on his family or people would have been outraged. Interesting way to keep the series going.
I’ve been re-reading Simon Hawke’s Time wars, this time with access to all books (I think in paper I’m missing 3 I could never find.)
The setup is incredibly stupid because that’s not the way wars work, though i could see someone who never much thought about it thinking that’s what it is.
BUT the series itself works, and it’s been keeping me amused.
For me, I do enjoy the relationship component of a series but (outside of romance, where it’s the point) there’s kind of a Bell Curve involved, where it starts out as a minor component of what’s going on (and what I enjoy about it), blows up and becomes a yuuuge component and I get invested in it, and then one shocking swerve too many throws me out of it. Meanwhile, the amount of it going on in the series will either hit the downward swing of the bell-curve a couple books beyond where my engagement curved downwards (probably in response to reader feedback) or continue on an upward straight-line vector to infinity.
And here’s the thing: people have family, have friends, have romantic interests. Even if a series is predominantly focused on the characters’ day jobs (or side-hustle/inadvertent hobby in the case of the amateur sleuth), their personal lives are liable to bleed over into it, if they have any at all, which is where social misfits like Holmes and Wolfe come in, or Father Brown, who is professionally required to *not* have a personal life. Basically, the personal life component, in a series not initially focused on that component, should be seen as an element of entropy which tends to increase over time. In particular the style of high fantasy that involves a lot of political intrigue, is necessarily going to involve somebody’s personal lives, even if it’s just Thorin’s people backing Thorin because they are Thorin’s people, in the teeth of Bard’s undeniable claim as dragonslayer to a share of the dragon hoard.
I think it’s probably normal to like some series from an author better than others. Usually, they’re trying to do different things with different series, so by definition not every series is going to work for every reader. I’m very fond of Peter Wimsey (Harriet, less so, as the years go on) but I find the Montagu Egg stories from the same author barely readable. I tend to be more or less down with MC Beeton’s historical romcoms (although it seems like she’s always contractually required to write at least two books beyond the point in a given series where she loses interest in the series gimmick), but her contemporary mysteries didn’t do much for me.
I’m fond of Peter Wimsey too. And Harriet also, since it’s clear in “Busman’s Honeymoon,” that she’s good for him. The posthumous sequel, “Thones and Dominions,” is also a favorite, tough the novels written solely by Jill Patton Walsh are not as good. Readable, and she follows the notes Sayers left behind about the future she foresaw for the Wimseys but the tone, inevitably, changes. (I think the best of the Walsh novels is, “The Attenbury Emeralds”).
I think the thing with relationships is they have major stages and if people aren’t moving through them it just becomes a source of unpleasant repetitive drama.
So if the meat of the story was in the ‘will they or won’t they’ once that’s answered, it’s over, yet if it isn’t answered for too long, it’s also over.
That’s a good way of putting it, and it’s one of the things Sayers does right.
Strong Poison: “Wimsey finds Vane, the love of his life, and saves her from the gallows but she’s not ready for a relationship yet,”
Have His Carcase: “Vane licks her wounds, gets involved in a mystery, discovers what a great intellectual partner Wimsey is, still isn’t ready for a relationship.” (BTW, although I love the resolution of the mystery, the middle section is a snore.)
Gaudy Night: “Vane realizes she’s not cut out to be a cloistered intellectual and is ready to accept Wimsey’s proposal.”
Busman’s Honeymoon: “What does married life look like between two amateur sleuths?”
Sayers was trying to marry them off from Strong Poison but she could not get them to commit.
As Chrismouse said above, the problem with the unchanging series concepts that you say you enjoy Sarah, is that for most of us, they get boring. Boring to read, and boring to write.
In my John Fisher series, for example, I had to take a break from John after book three (Yes, the series will be back in print SOON, and book three will come out, Three Ravens is going to do re-releases of the first two at a One a Quarter rate, then release book three) Even though John is growing and changing a little, I was growing bored with his character and needed a break from it. I’ll come back to it, but there was something else I wanted to do first, and unlike you, I can’t write two different novels at the same time, my brain just isn’t wired that way.
Reacher? Don’t get me started. I liked the books for the first half dozen or so, but even ignoring the fact that the author is an unrepentant Brit, who’s never served, and knows nothing about our military, police, or firearms except what he reads in the NYT and on Wiki (and that’s super hard for me to ignore.)
I can only take so many formulaic “super badass drifter walks into town, someone is getting screwed by the governing organization, there’s a babe, the drifter gets messed with by the same organization, ass-kicking ensues, the babe and the drifter do the horizontal bop, one of the good guys dies, the bad guys all get killed/arrested, and the drifter drifts on again with the babe behind him calling “Shane, come back.”
Real people grow, they change. That’s part of the problem with the left, is that they want to freeze everyone in some sort of infantile state of unchanging infants cared for by the ‘benevolent’ state. Of course, they see themselves as the exception, as the commissars of that aforementioned state, but that’s not the most horrible of their ideas. The freezing of development is the worst.
David Freer’s column this week indulged in a bit of schadenfreude regarding the way the Chinese Worldcon turned out. Something about the Americans who were all in on the glories of the revolution being horrified to discover their “allyship,” didn’t mean squat to their hosts.
I would definitely like to know more…
weirdly, I was just sent a column on this. I mean, that someone else published.
there’s another good article about worldcon here: https://fandompulse.com/2024/01/23/sandman-creator-neil-gaiman-outraged-at-chengdu-worldcon-hugo-award-ineligibility-debacle/
I find it amusing as hell that the morons who created the rules from Worldcon 2017 are somehow surprised that the communist government they invited into the game would use that same rule set against them!
They’re still, bizarrely, convinced that communists are the good guys.
They’re the types who’d rather die than admit they were wrong.
It is common, among armed forces that recruit children, to culminate the (surviving) children’s training by having them commit murder. Then, as long as they remain with the force, the deed is something praiseworthy. If they leave, they have to deal with its being shameful.
You probably get the same reaction if you were an accessory to mass murder.
It must be brutal to write like that – that’s where Curtain and the Reichenbach Falls come from.
I like Rex Stout, because the problem is the book. Also, going to a familiar place. Archie and Wolfe do change, but it’s not drastic, or sudden.
I thought I could do that for the shifters, with minor, slow changes. but the setup itself made it impossible.
The first couple of Rex Stouts didn’t do much for me, but somewhere about three or four I was liking them a bit better. I need to get back to them I guess. I’m about to give up buying ebooks for Lent, and the local library has a decent selection of Stouts in ebook form.
With regards to the shifters, I hear you and sympathize. It seems like the map is never the territory, whether we’re plotters or pantsers or something in between.
Stout is…. a political idiot. But other than that, they’re very good.
Political idiots are unfortunately Tuesday, in every genre, will try not to hold it against him 😉
I’ve always liked a good series best, when available and done well. I didn’t start out writing to produce a book, or even a story — I started out to produce a series (and of course, the rest had to fall into place accordingly). I knew I didn’t have the chops to keep a story going cleanly forever, so my first two forays were 4-book series (with enough open-endedness that more could be tacked on if I thought it a good idea later). I did it that way so that I could learn how to construct the foundation for a truly long running series.
While this was going on, I was paying more attention to good existing series, especially the C J Cherryh “Foreigner” series where, with just two POV characters, she has managed to keep my eager interest in their massively changing world for more than 20 volumes. That was (and is) a Master Class.
My model, however, is not “great SFF series” (of which there aren’t enough) but the 17th-18th century Military/Naval series, which are a form of “young man asks for/falls into adventurous career and eventually rises in society”. I don’t really care that much about military minutia beyond a point (in any era) — what I wanted to do was a cross between a throwback to an older SciFi era (the one-man entrepreneuerial rise of a private Rocket Ship to the Stars!) and a Business Building entrepreneurship, for which I wanted a British Industrial Revolution sort of background, and for that I really needed wizards and thus a Fantasy rather than SciFi setting. I like the build-a-business/build-a-career structure (I’m a retired COO), and that requires an evolving age and social context set of changes. I’m very happy with how my choice is working out (though frustrated by health etc. delays in getting the first entries completed and to market). Pretty sure I can keep it going fruitfully until my fingers collapse on the keyboard.
If you haven’t read the _From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper_ series, you should take a look. It’s that sort of naval series in space.
Know them well and like them.
I think a long running series requires some central continuity. I started the Wheel of Time with the omnibus edition, and loved the first book in the set, however that was the first book chronologically, not the first book in the series and followed two secondary characters, so hitting the first main book, following the real main characters was intensely jarring.
Honor Harrington I read through the main series several times, up until around the Mesan thing took over. I think there it was a combination of not finding Mesa believable, and fatigue at seeing Manticore pushed to the bring of collapse again.
The Star Wars extended universe (legacy stuff) I read quite a lot of, until I realized that every single character does violently. Every single one. No-one has a happy ending.
Xanth I was able to read a lot of. It was different central characters every time, but they were all boy meets girl, they have ridiculous puny heavy adventures, and live happily ever after, and likely one of their kids will get tangled up in the next silliness.
The Vorkosigan novels I devoured right up through Cryoburn, but didn’t feel the news to go further.
The current wip, I’ve got three complete stories in its continuity, but they are so completely different, there is no way they could be a proper series. I expect I’m probably going to have to have disclaimers in the ad copy saying, ‘if you liked that, there’s no guarantee you’ll like this.’ Same characters, but completely different points in their lives, and completely different types of conflicts.
The Vorkosigan saga was amazing. I can only think of one dud, and I’m too lazy to go look up the title.
I strongly dislike series where the main character(s) don’t grow and change and it’s all about the gimmick/antagonist of the week but it doesn’t matter to anyone.
So I prefer that a long running series hands off to the next generation of characters who have something to learn or prove or achieve.
Which is what Weber tried to do with “Shadows of Saganami” and sequels. I think part of what he ran into is that in attempting to return to the “single ship captain who outthinks and outfights his opponent”, he realized that he had grown the Manticoran tech advantage so far that it was like handing the first level adventuring party vorpal blades and magic armor to go hunt orcs.
Incidentally, Alma seems to be handling that much more smoothly with Familiars: Generations.
OldNFO pulled that off with his Grey Man series, and it looks like Rimworld and Rift series are also allowing character development. Not enough books in the western series to see how that plays out, but I have hopes.
Like Alma’s Familiar series, when Mr Curtis publishes a new book, it gets snagged right away. (I haven’t read Colplatski beyond the prequel, nor the Cat among Dragons. Maybe later.)
“OldNFO pulled that off with his Grey Man series”
Not really IMHO; he got the next generation in one book to where the earlier series took 3, which seemed forced to me.
I’ve written things that might loosely be called generational sagas, just because I had Ideas that seemed to happen in similar settings with similar male leads that clearly couldn’t all be happening to the same guy. Might or might not end up doing it again. But I usually approach someone else’s “Next Generation” stories with a certain amount of trepidation. Sometimes thetrepidation is unjustified – I came around on Trek: Next Generation eventually, and LOTR won this Hobbit fan over pretty quickly. But more often I find the same disappointment I feel in moving from the colorful, larger-than-life Charlemagne to his bickering sons. In literature as in life, a lot of times the children or successors of compelling people tend to be rather weak and shadowy figures.
One notes it’s even more flexible when the “next generation” has no necessary connection to the first generation. There are series that are built about a group of people with connections, and there are series that are built about a setting.
The problem with the last is that you have to have a strong setting to make it a series, but flexibility with characters is not a problem.
Oh, sigh … series books. I do adore the Pratchett books because they aren’t really a series, just a whole bunch of evolving characters in a particular setting, a setting which is so huge that the possibilities are almost infinite.
As for other series that I followed – I faded out of Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone series when it seemed like she was a big enough seller that the editors let her books become brick doorstoppers. I much preferred the earlier books which were lean, tight, self-contained and short. I liked Robert Barnard’s books because they weren’t series – so, there were a couple of regular detectives in his books, but most of them were more like novels with a mystery element.
I’m getting ready to wrap up the Luna City series at 12 installments (to the sorrow of those readers who love them!) because the central tentpole character is finally marrying his long-time girlfriend. He has also grown up and finally embraced adult responsibilities after having suffered a prolonged and messy adolescence. It’s a good finishing point; finishing a plot arc in a good way. (Also, two of the real-life people we based characters on have passed away in recent years.) I may do an off-shoot series later on, based on some of the older characters as young kids in the 20s and 30s.
The Adelsverein historical, which are sort of a series featuring members of several interconnected families over almost a hundred years have now gotten to the point where I can’t think of anything more for them all. When it becomes a grim slog, filling out another episode in history – that’s time to search around for something else, something one can write and be energetic and enthused about.
I have an idea for a new series, which I think I will have fun with – a family going west on the California-Oregon trail in the late 1840s, just before the gold rush. That will be aimed at the YA demographic, and something that I can wholeheartedly recommend to young readers.
My favorite kind of series. ^.^
“We don’t follow the one guy forever. We are reading a series of stories in the same… uh… area, network, region….”
yes. That is my favorite too. Except for mysteries.
My ‘Republic of Texas Navy’ series is somewhat odd. I wrote’Texas at the Coronation’ as a standalone book to introduce the world and the characters (and, honestly, to see if it would fly or flop). When it succeeded I went into a multi-book story arc for WW2, which I currently have planned for books 2 – 4 (yes, I’m working on book 4 now).
After that, I’m going to jump forward 20 years or so for a Cold War / Space Race story arc. I have no idea how many books that will run.
Longer term I want to jump ahead about 100 – 200 years and morph the story into a Science Fiction world.
Some settings seem to demand that. Always remember that Tolkien’s life’s work consisted of a sort of personal Bullfinch’s Mythology that was not published in his lifetime, a children’s novel, a three-volume novel bridging the gap between the two, and a big empty space in the middle of the timeline occupied by his personal Atlantis myth and a portrait of a failed marriage (Alderion and Erendis, found in Unfinished Tales).
And he never wrote that time travel story.
There was a mystery series that I never read, but which I got warned away from because the author did a massive stupid several books in. Main character was a female forensic detective. In fifth book (or whatever number it was), her fiance gets murdered, and she performs the autopsy. Next book, fiance comes back, and the body she autopsied was somebody else made to look like fiance. Because, yeah, she would totally be allowed to do the autopsy, and also not notice it was not her lover’s body.
So, yeah, if you’re going to off a main character, don’t then undo it. And if you do undo it, don’t undo it stupidly, because you’ll bounce readers right out and get them warning others away.
$SPOUSE (who refuses to do anything online) wanted some new mysteries, and I was thinking of the Thin Man when I found the Nick and Nora books. (Nick is a cat…) She seems to like the books, but I made it halfway into the first book when a major character’s name changed completely for no reason. I went back through the relevant section to see what I had missed: Nothing, beyond lack of editing. At that point, I skipped to the last chapter to see whodunit and walled the series from my Kindle.
I’ve read (and mostly tolerated) books where the author was editproof, but this is the first time I found the first book in the series to have a major brainfart.
The succeeding books in the series might be worth reading, but that’s not a bridge I’m willing to cross.
So, that’s more copyedit. And unless it’s trad, it’s not the writer being edit proof, it’s more the writer not having money for copyeditors. Fortunately I FINALLY found a very good one. Spoiler, she’s a friend, who was there all along, just never thought of asking for work. She’s affordable, too.
Sorry, I wasn’t referring to this book’s author as editproof (looking at the ghost of Tom Clancy). Might well have been the case of lack of money, but it threw me out of the story hard. Having the cat be the reincarnation of a detective was a stretch already, but the change in names was too much.
Oh, I get that. In my case, I’ve found because I juggle books, I need a file of names. Particularly for Winter Prince, which has a cast of hundred secondary characters….
You need a desktop Wiki. Plenty of open source options for it, including ZimWiki and Obsidian (which I use because I think in Markdown).
Also, you need to finish that book so I can read it.
Tom Clancy is a very weird case. Yes, he was basically editor proof after his first novel (and my oh my did it show — Patriot Games was the first book I ever walled, and it left a mark that may still be in that wall today), but I read one of his later books in the 2000s, I think it was called Teeth of the Tiger, and… that was not just a case of being editor proof, it was the author not giving a fuck in the slightest. And that’s before you get to the fact that he went full fascist, and worse, smugly full fascist. It was rather disturbing, both in how awful the book was at the story construction and character level, but also how utterly evil the very premise of the story was, with the author seemingly unaware.
Meh, missing a name change in a first book is hardly a worst offense. Even David Drake had it happen (though only once) in the first RCN novel. One of the early mentions was missed by him and his editor, and so Daniel Leary is called something else. Honestly, I’ve read it twice and it never even pinged for me.
Not quite the same situation as yours, but getting ducks in a row in first in a series, particularly if its an indie author, I can overlook some bumps. (Granted, as an editor, I do TRY to catch such things, but stuff does slip past.)
What got me was the name change was that of the victim, where the entire story was built around finding out what happened to her. Midway through the book, the name changed. This wouldn’t need an editor, but it seems like a beta reader would have noticed. (It would be like changing Archie Goodwin’s name to Jack Smith.)
The story was a stretch, anyway. Nick the cat had belonged to a detective who had died, (IIRC, murdered shortly before the story started) and the cat had an amazing ability to do detective work. It became clear by the end (I skipped a few chapters, might have been some woo-woo that didn’t show up in the first half) that the cat was the reincarnation of the detective. The main character being named Nora was, er, interesting. If I wanted a Thin Man pastiche, I’d have reread Other Rhodes. 🙂
Technically, it was a Nero Wolfe pastiche. Making Archie a lady and involved with the Nero figure was part of filing off the serial numbers. 🙂
Other Rhodes is a Rex Stout Pastiche. And I need to finish the next….
I sit corrected. I’ve read a little of the Nero Wolfe mysteries, and close to none of the Thin Man. [Makes note to correct that after the TBR stack is whittled down a bit more.]
I know that Deej will scream, but I don’t like The Thin Man. De gustibus, etc.
I do love a good, super-long series. I’ve read all Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe books, most of them twice, and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin books are amazing. They each have more than 20 books.
In both series, the characters are somewhat set, but I think the variety of adventures keeps everything fresh. It also helped that most were written by the time I discovered the series.
I love CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner series, but for some reason had a gap between reading books 5 and 6 (IIRC). I worried I’d forgotten lots of details and that I should start again from the beginning and haven’t. Something similar happened with the O’Brians–I reached book 19, had to wait for book 20 and then never got back to them. Now, obviously I need to start at the beginning. Maybe when I retire for both series.
I posted a long comment to this – where did it go?
The spam filter – again. For some reason WP doesn’t like you. It’s been doing it intermittently for several weeks. I clear them as fast as I find them, but I’ve been out of the office.
Oh, was it? It’s been doing htis with a lot of regulars at ATH.
Yes. Karen, Lauren, and Celia are the most often diverted to the spam trap, but it happens occasionally with others as well. WPDE in saecula saeculorum.
amen.
It’s not in any of the holding spots. I’m sorry. I think wordpress ate it.
I like series but more than anything I like stories that end. I’ve never really got into American comic books because they don’t end, manga is superior in that regard. Next generation can be done well, it can also be done poorly. I’m not one for the monster of the week or case of the week format; I like watching the characters grow and change. I like the experience of a single story told over multiple entries more than a serial format that’s why I like Farscape more than Star Trek: the Next Generation.
A trilogy is my max binge. I try to push beyond that, and I go cold.
I can pick it back up after a year or more passes, and I’m good for another trilogy.
But serial after serial? I just can’t do it. Even when I’m really enjoying the series, and there’s a clear end to the series at five or six books. The necessary headspace or emotional investment just compounds to the point it’s just too much.
The only series my muse is even vaguely interested in is the possibility of two stories in the same setting, or possibly a short story cycle. As my readers know, none have come to fruition.
Ken Pence is good at series, although they do tend to spiral out of control. One of them went woke and reviewers (including me) hammered him for it. Several years later, I checked him out, again. He dropped that.
I just read an eight book series, _World Wright Inc_, in which the books were just really long chapters. There was maybe just a hint of closure when a book ended. The next one picked up right where the previous one left off. Binge reading, it was fine. I think I would have been a bit peeved if I had caught up with the author, though. Maybe I have and didn’t even notice that there will be more.
I liked Michael Anderle until that “world” got so large that I couldn’t keep track of what was going on with whom and when.
I’m not sure where “Ken Pence” came from. “Laurence Dahners” is who I meant.
Isn’t it bizarre when your brain does that? I hate it particularly when I find typos like that in my books. It’s like “uh…. where even did that come from?”