Search results for: quadrilogy

Do You Prefer Tetralogy or Quadrilogy?

Both terms refer to a series of four books, and it seems like that might be where our ghost story is headed.

Our writing output so far consists of three trilogies. A trilogy of trilogies, if you will. It’s all very tidy. But now that the prose outline for our spectral saga is nearing completion we’re faced with a story that seems to want to break neatly into four pieces. And we’re not sure how we feel about that.

Our main work sessions are currently devoted to editing the Science Novels. Since we’re only brainstorming this spooky bad boy part-time, we still have a lot of detail to fill in, but the parts that we do know (and are quite attached to) include four momentous events. The sort of events that would make resounding, satisfying finales. It’s certainly possible that one of them could be adjusted and made into a tentpole moment, the sort of mini-climax that shows up in the middle of a novel to keep readers on the edge of their seats, but we’re hesitant to jump right to that.

We’re still exploring the story and interrogating the secondary characters for exciting backstories. This new story world is expansive and the last thing we want to do is hem ourselves in prematurely. For now we’ll keep talking during our nightly dog walks, and keep expanding everything. By the time we’re ready to make this project our main focus, we’ll have oceans of material to work with. At that point we’ll be better situated to tell whether there’s enough material to fill the spaces between those four big events and make our first Tetra/Quadrilogy.

Let’s hope we don’t have to figure out the word for a series of five.

Mostly Not Failing to Plan

We did it! Or rather, Jen did it! The fourth and final book in the Ghost Series is fully synopsized (mostly). It has a beginning, a whole lotta middle, and an end that almost completely holds together if you don’t look at it too closely. We know the broad strokes, and that’s good enough for now.

You know how the weather forecast for tomorrow is a lot more reliable than the forecast for next Friday? It’s kind of like that. Some of the details toward the end are fuzzy, but it’s so far away it doesn’t really matter. By the time we get there we’ll have plenty of time to sharpen it up.

Vague as some of the details are, As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #4 is shaping up to be a beast. The synopsis is 27 pages long, nearly twice what #3 came in at. We’ve started to wonder if maybe we’re dealing with a pentalogy instead of a quadrilogy. It could be that it’s too much story for one book, or it could just be that we gave a lot of thought to the ending, so we know more about it. Time will tell.

All together the 4 synopses are 40,000 words. That’s 75 single-spaced pages. It’s tempting to slap it into one file and call it a novella.

A writing partner is someone who doesn’t let you take the easy way out.

No, After *You*

A month ago we were lamenting how intimidating it’s been for us to reenter composition mode. “Oh, woe,” we cried. “It’s been so long since we wrote actual prose!” And “It’s been literal years since we began a new story world, how ever shall we remember how to do it?”

We can be quite melodramatic when it suits us.

In the weeks since that declaration, we came up with myriad excuses for not actually setting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. It was, frankly, getting ridiculous. During one of our daily forest snow strolls with the pooches, we finally diagnosed ourselves. We were each waiting for the other one to go first, each holding the door open, hoping the other half of the writing team would charge through into the unknown.

Whoever goes first makes a bunch of creative decisions that impact the rest of the novel. They set the tone with language use. They set the pace of the prose. They give us the first glimpse inside a new character’s head and heart. It’s a lot of responsibility!

Usually Kent will jump in and write the earliest scenes while Jen wraps up the last few stubs of the first batch. It’s a process that’s worked well for us, but at least the last 4 novels we wrote were all set in existing story worlds. There are a lot fewer unknowns in an existing story world. Kent wasn’t sure Jen wanted him to plunge in this time. Perhaps she wanted to be the style master this time? Please? No. Being the one to write 100% of the stubs (maybe 99.5%), Jen feels like she already has enough influence over how the story is told.

And so, with great fanfare, Kent slipped into his speedo and took the plunge! This very week saw the minting of the inaugural words, sentences, and paragraphs of the Rune Skelley Ghost Quadrilogy! And what words (and sentences and paragraphs) they are!

A good writing partnership is one where both partners are happy to either lead or follow.

Four Times the Fun

The thing about quadrilogies (or tetralogies if you prefer) is that they’re longer than trilogies. Like, an entire book longer. And in our case, that extra book is shaping up to be the longest of the series. That’s nothing unusual. You’ve probably noticed in other series you read that the books tend to get longer as their roman numeral suffixes get higher. We were expecting Book 4 to be a bit of a beast. Were, in fact, braced and ready to flip our new whiteboard over and continue our plot rainbow on the back. The damn thing could be 16 feet long if it needed to be! We were prepared. Or so we thought.

When you’re writing a ghost story, you can’t count on death to prune your cast the way you can with other genres. Characters have a way of piling up as we discovered when we tried to set up the rainbow for Book 4. We had nearly twice as many characters as places to put them. The snazzy grid on the whiteboard has room for 11 rows. We needed 18. Not all of these people will have Point of View, but we need to keep track of their comings and goings and dastardly deeds.

We tried looking for ways to lump characters together into a shared row, but there weren’t enough we could do that with to solve the problem. We tried arranging them in columns instead, but that gave us too few rows for the plot. We scratched our collective head and joked about buying a second board.

In the end we dusted off our paper cutter and chopped all our beautiful squares in half, allowing two people to share a row while maintaining their individuality. We have embraced the rectangle lifestyle. The main difference is that Jen has to write smaller to fit all the important info in half the space, but she’s up for the challenge. We just hope we have enough magnets. We bought 400 of the little suckers, and for most plots that would be more than sufficient. Depending on how dense this rainbow ends up being, we might need more, which is truly kind of terrifying.

A good writing partner is someone who isn’t afraid of all the neodymium.

Here’s the Plan (2021 Edition)

Ah, the smell of a fresh new year. So crisp, so clean, so innocent!

Over the course of several recent dog-walking excursions, Kent and Jen developed their master plan for 2021. The first item on the agenda is finishing the edits on Grandson of Science Novel. We had originally hoped to wrap it up in 2020, but that didn’t quite happen, so we’ll take a couple of weeks now and knock it out.

As the dust settles from that, we’ll decamp to the Auxiliary Writing Cave and dig in on plotting our new Ghost Series. We have a bazillion notes — some in longhand, some electronic. Once those have been wrangled into order, we’ll start at the beginning and flesh the whole thing out. This will likely take quite some time, since it’s looking like it’s going to be a 4-book series (quadrilogy? tetralogy?). Somehow, this is the first time we’ve planned an entire series at once and we want to make sure we do it right. The Auxiliary Writing Cave has comfy furniture and a fireplace (and a hidden bookcase), and is the perfect place to enjoy a hot beverage, with or without alcohol, so we’re quite excited about it.

After the plotting we have a split in the flowchart. If we’re feeling excited and energized about all things ghostly, we’ll jump in and start writing the first book in the series. On the other hand, if we feel a little wrung out, and like the batteries need some time to recharge, we’ll switch gears and edit Sibling of Music Novel.

If there’s still time left in the year after that, we’ll do whichever task we skipped in the last step.

And in our copious free time, we’ll start to figure out the next big concept to fill the void when the Ghost Series is done.

That plan should keep us quite happily occupied all year, but it could all go out the window. Our agent is shopping two novels for us, and when a publisher bites there will probably be one or two things they’d like us to do. A little upheaval for a good cause? Sign us up!