Okay, perhaps you’re here from Part One or maybe you’ve stumbled across part two all on your own. My suggestion? Go read part one. Please? I put a lot of work into it! You won’t be disappointed, I swear! Okay! So now that you’re all caught up (*ahem* right?) I’m going to push into what I found especially interesting as a guy planning multiple books…

DAY TWO

Series VS Sequence VS Universe.

Without any context, that above line is super weird, right? Well, let me conjure up some memories and HOPEFULLY do my teacher proud.

SERIES – A series of books can be read separately, or are enriched together, but the main concept behind each book is that the stakes rise only in each book and then return to an equilibrium. Like crime novels for example follow this well: Inciting Incident, Tension Increases, Crime Solved, End, Repeat. Of course there’s no definite rules, but this is a guideline.

SEQUENCE – (This is where I live, I have *some* regrets) A sequence of books is essentially where the tension continues to increase! This is madness incarnate, but think of Lord of the Rings and feel free to include The Hobbit if you’d like. From finding a magic ring, to a quest involving the whole world rallying behind two hobbits, the stakes never go down!

UNIVERSE – A universe is where all stories happen in the same world, but not necessarily between the same characters or even at the same time. Tolkien does this to a fair extent with Middle Earth, but Star Wars, Star Trek or even Dragonlance are all great examples of universes!

One thing I took away at this point was how to really look at my own series. I have NINE books planned (at least *cries*) so looking from the top down, I needed to ask myself, what is the overarching theme that I love about my world? The Evolution of Magic. Then, I started breaking it all down from that level for my main character from a Sequence, down to the individual trilogies and further down to the novels themselves. In the end, it looked a lot like a fantasy football table or even a family tree.

JEFFERSON (SEQUENCE)

• TRILOGY 1 – Becomes a Reluctant, Wandering God.
• TRILOGY 2 – Abandoned by Old Gods in near world ending event.
• TRILOGY 3 – Gathers New Gods, replaces Old Gods. (The End)

JEFFERSON (TRILOGY 1)

• BOOK 1 – Becomes a magician.
• BOOK 2 – Ends the world, becomes immortal.
• BOOK 3 – Returns through time to defeat a god, replacing that god.

JEFFERSON (BOOK 1)

• TURNING POINT 1 – Survives magical attack, recruited to magicians.
• TURNING POINT 2 – Is abandoned by mentor who loses his mind.
• CLIMAX – Faces his mentor, defeats him (but does not win).

The above is a simple breakdown of my world, but when planning a sequence this obviously helped as you can see just how high the stakes are from the nine book breakdown below Jefferson’s sequence heading. Going deeper into each tier shows you how each trilogy answers one question, then each book must answer one question and within each book there must be the following:

• TURNING POINT 1 – Generally this is the Inciting Incident, a call to adventure or crime or whatever the case may be.
• TURNING POINT 2 – This is shortly after the mid point where your protagonist is dealing with the fallout from uncovering the true threat.
• CLIMAX – Character succeeds or fails as to the ticking time bomb you lit the fuse on in chapter one.

Again, all of these are just guides to give you a sense of where you’re heading. None of this will be guaranteed to make you a blockbuster novelist (if it does, email me and I’ll accept a bank transfer thanks) but the more you know can’t hurt.

Okay folks, it’s now 12:58 am and I am in the airport in less than twelve hours. Luckily I’m packed and ready to go, but I’m going to end this post off here. The remainder of day two was spent talking about different character types in the world and their function in regards to your story. If you’re keen for me to go into that, by all means leave me a comment or harass me on social media @thetjedwards everywhere! (Also, please don’t harass me, that will get you nowhere… I don’t believe in the astrological signs, but if there’s one thing they got right, I am a bull headed Taurus… mess with the bull and you get the horns!) Anyway folks, see you on the other side of my hunt for Odin (read: visit to Scandinavia)!