High Altitude Viewing

There are two kinds of series in the book world (okay, there are probably more, but play along for now) — the episodic kind, where each novel is its own complete adventure, and the serial kind, where each novel tells part of a larger story. We write the second kind. Our novels, while each having a satisfyingly complete story, are parts of a larger whole.

We’ve been on the road a lot lately, and as we talked about last week, that’s pulled us away from composition of our current work in progress. As we find our way back into the writing, we took the opportunity to pull back from the minutia of scene-by-scene storytelling and take a look at not just the novel, but at its place in the trilogy.

Due to our weird, inside out process on this trilogy, we’re writing the middle book last. It was really interesting to look at the bigger picture and make sure that the edges are still lining up with the existing books. The last thing we want is for the railroad we’ve been building from both ends to fail to meet in the middle.

We were really pleased with what our aerial view showed us. There is a nice escalation of stakes from one book to the next. (Or a really unpleasant one, if you’re one of our characters.) The phenomenon that makes our story world unique gets explored from a new angle each time, by different sorts of characters. It felt really good to see our kingdom laid out beneath us just the way we’d pictured it.

A writing partner is someone who you can enjoy having your head in the clouds with, but will also help you land the plane.

and without even meaning to, we included planes, trains, and automobiles in this post!