System Is Working As Intended

For the Ghost Series, we made a very deliberate choice to get all four books figured out before writing any prose for the first one. Our approach is to consider the project as one big story. Ideas that arise later on in the process might necessitate laying some groundwork in earlier books, and we aimed to give ourselves the most flexibility to do that without getting stuck in an infinite loop of rewrites.

Without an over-arching plan, without making lots of decisions up front, what would happen is we’d wrap up Book 1 and send it out for feedback, and then meanwhile we’d be working on Book 2 and discover a bunch of shiny new ideas that don’t match what we’ve written already. Meaning when our beta readers send us their comments, half of them have been obviated upon arrival. And once we started in on Book 3, the same situation would replay — only twice as bad, because now we’re trying to retroactively account for stuff in two prior books.

Ask us how we know. (Never mind; we’re about to tell you anyway.)

Our previous series grew organically. We’d write a book, and then discover that there was more story to tell using that world and those characters. So we’d write another book, and then another. So far, that progression has always led to trilogies. In one case, we did actually plan out books 2 & 3 in tandem rather than separately. We were starting to get the message even then. With the Ghost Series being a tetralogy, the benefits of advance planning are multiplied because so are the impacts of doing it inadequately.

So, we did a lot of planning. Lots of writing sessions that produced no writing per se.

At this point, we are working on Book 2. And so far? No major revisions have come up for Book 1. Several minor changes, and we’ll surely have more tinkering to deal with. But it’s likely to all be small-scale stuff like which tarot card gets drawn, rather than anything huge like swapping which characters are living and which are ghosts.

A writing partner is someone who helps with all the pre-writing as much as with generating pages of manuscript.