As you can see, I’ve finally settled on a new name for this blog. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to add a banner to the blog page on my site, but I will, because I’m quite fond of this one I whipped up last night. It makes me chuckle. And we all could use a good chuckle, right?
I’ve been doing some planning. Or a lot of planning, actually. I follow Holly Lisle’s blog, and she’s been doing something very inspiring over the last few months (moreso because she’s also been moving her entire online presence to a new platform, which is about the least fun thing ever for anyone, but she has an entire course load and community to shift, which is about like moving the Titanic).
Holly’s been writing/revising a five-book series all at once. Well, one at a time, but consecutively, without releasing any of them until they’re all done. She wrote all the drafts, and now she’s going back through and revising them all, to ensure continuity and cohesiveness throughout the series.
Which is genius, when you think about it. Once you have all the books in a series done, the hard work is finished. And then you can release them all at once, or one per month, or one every other month…which means people can finish one, look forward to the next, and pre-order the rest, since they’ll all be scheduled out and public.
Genius, I think. Especially when you can write as steadily as she has for the past…nearly a year.
In any case, I don’t know if I have the patience to do the same thing Holly’s doing, but I love the concept. And just watching her work has inspired me to, if not write all the books at once, at least plan all the books in the series out before I even start writing, getting as much detail down as I can, and making sure the plots mesh as much as possible before digging in.
Things will change as I write – they always do, but even though I like to just start writing and see what happens, it’s a lot less work to have a roadmap when I have to make the most out of every little bit of writing time I can grab.
So I’ve been planning, and plotting, and laying out a series that’s getting bigger the farther I dig into it. Once I decided that I really wanted to write a family saga, the floodgates kind of just whooshed open, and suddenly I had three families involved, starting with mail-order brides (which I now have to research) and ending up in present day with the tangible items that each of the first three women deemed important enough to pass down through generations.
The story feels big – really big. We’ll see what happens as I get deeper into the storylines, but I’m excited to explore the different legacies swirling around in my head.
More to come as I dig deeper into The Magpie Legacies.
Of course, I also recently got an idea for a series themed around lamps….
