When I was a kid I would spend a month every summer at my grandparents house in a little town in Michigan. I was an avid reader of fantasy and sci-fi. The books I enjoyed were rarely available in libraries, they could only be found in book stores in big urban centers. I fell in love With Anne Mccaffrey’s Pern books and packed the whole series in my suitcase for a summer trip. My grandmother exclaimed I had brought a library with me. Each book the size of half a brick and I had weeded down to the bare minimum.
The other piece of this invention was making self publishing more affordable. This has given rise to a different way of generating series. I call it the partial book release where the content that use to exist in one book is in three to four books.
As an author I get it. These breaking apart of books allows for more revenue and hooks a new reader who may be flummoxed by the shear size of a novel. Plus the writer can release it out in predictable chunks.
There are times that I have looked at my book and wondered if I could do the same. I have had discussions with friends, colleagues and readers of my work about it. The verdict is my stories don’t work that way. I had this love of the less popular series by Douglas Adams called Dirk Gently’s Holistic Adventure which plays with the idea of the interconnectedness of all things. An idea I see acted out throughout my life.
Where the most banal of moments or object has this deeper meaning or connection to some major events in our lives. As you read through it, the book will seem lost and confusing but as you come to the end everything snaps into place like a puzzle the reader is putting together.
Whereas the authors who can do these broken up books know how to do this thing where they write a plot arc and leave you with cliffhangers. A friend of mine asked me the other day if I had any I was hooked on. I do. I will give you two authors that every
time the next book comes out I read it.
First Book in the series is called: School in Magic
This series is set in another world full of feudal culture and old world values. The main character is a person who is summoned there from our world. She learns magic with hard ethics from another time. She shares ideas of thought and technology with this world from ours. This in turn spurs social wars that begins a maelstrom I want to get my next fix on with each passing book.
First Book in the series is called: Harley Merlin and the Secret Coven
Urban fantasy about a girl who grew up in the foster system that found she had some unexplainable abilities. She finds a way to market them and ends up being found by the world her parents she never knew came from. A magical society living under the nose of the rest of the world. Book is full of intrigue, the main character finding out who she is while learning the vast skeletons of her family and why she had grown up feeling so alone.
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