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Announcing Pocketful of Rocks – Book 3 of What If Wasn’t — now available on Amazon Pre-Order.

Alyse died in his arms and nobody cares if he’s sorry.

Hitting rock bottom hurts, and when Peter finds himself there for the second time, he shatters. Family and friends disappear, politics and the court system conspire to cancel his future, and Peter himself isn’t sure he wants to survive.

Over a period of months following the boat wreck, Peter learns that being sorry isn’t nearly enough and some broken things can’t be easily mended — even him.

Maybe a pocketful of rocks is the answer to everybody’s problems.  

As he realizes the depths of the damage he’s done, he contemplates whether the solution to his problems might not be a pocketful of rocks.

I write series

Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?

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I have no problem with standalone novels. I read a lot of them and enjoy them. Some stories can be told in 80,000 words. I believe that. There’s nothing wrong with standalone novels.

For me, however, I write series. I’ve got three under development currently. Even some of my WIPs that started as standalone projects have spilled over into two or three books.

First Book Sells the Second Book

A body of work with interconnected stories gives readers a reason to come back to the same author. It’s really a marketing technique. Since Amazon now has an app for tracking page reads, I can see a trend, particularly with Transformation Project. Someone starts Life As We Knew It. Sometimes they read half the first day and half the next or sometimes they read the whole thing in one day. Then, someone (most likely the same someone since who reads the second book in a series without reading the first) starts reading Objects in View. Most of my reads appear to be people reading the entire series, just based on numbers. So while I advertise all the books, I spend my big money on the first book in the series and let it do the work for the rest.

Great Characters Doing Interesting Things

I’m a character-driven writer, but only so many characters with interesting stories present themselves to me, and generally those stories are the ones that wander through my mind the most. Which is good. I have enough of a cacophony of characters in my mind with the active stories. If I had dozens of standalone novels, I’d be horribly distracted — not just from the story I’m trying to tell, but from real life. Yes, authors live real lives beyond the boundaries of our pages and, yes, I want to be present for my life.

Because I write series, I know I have lots of opportunities to tell stories. I can show Peter, the main character in the What If Wasn’t series, acting like an immature teenager without a clue to where he’s headed in Red Kryptonite Curve and yet know I have lots of opportunities for him to get it right — or not — in future books.

World-Building

World-building is where speculative fiction writers rise and fall. It’s tough to build a great alternative universe. It’s a little easier to build a community for a more mainstream story. For me, having done the work, why waste it? You can bring readers time and time again to this world where they know their way around and feel comfortable, so I can then concentrate on the stories the characters want to tell.

There’s power in telling stories over a long period of time. Shane is not the same person in Gathering In as he was when readers met him in Life As We Knew It. External events and internal torments set him on a journey of change. I don’t think I could tell that story in one book. He’d be a flat one-dimensional character and the behaviors I’ll show in “Winter’s Reckoning” (due out this fall) wouldn’t really make sense.

Variety is the Spice & Seasoning of Life & Literature

I enjoy standalone novels and I write series. I also love to read series. There’s something about the story arc done over a period of time that is very compelling. Most of us live in interconnectedness. Our teen years inform our 20s, our 30s inform our 40s, etc. Why should books be different? Some stories can be told in less than $100,000, but others maybe take several thousand pages. And it all works for some readers at different times.

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Today is the launch of Gathering In (Book 5 of Transformation Project series).

I’ve put my characters through a lot (terrorist attacks, radioactive rain, an air-handling system failure, a corn-field fire, confiscation of crops by the USDA) and they’re going to lose big in this latest book. Such is life for characters in an apocalyptic novel series.

Have you ever thought about how food gets to your local grocery store? How would it get there if the major transportation hubs were destroyed and rendered no-go zones?

Have you ever thought about where antibiotics come from and whether those avenues would be available in an apocalyptic situation? What about heart medications? Antidepressants? You name it. It’s unlikely it was made within a few miles of your home. So what do you do if the apocalypse happens? What can you do?

I live in Alaska, where everything comes through the Port of Anchorage. In fact, Anchorage International Airport is the second-busiest cargo airport in the United States. Last year Anchorage was hit by a 7.1 quake (which is NOTHING compared to the Anchorage Quake of 1964 – 9.2 or the Denali Quake of 2002 – 7.9) and roadways collapsed all over town. The airport was closed for a few hours. The railroad was offline for about 24 hours. The main road between Anchorage and Fairbanks was fine, but there are three “structurally deficient” bridges between here and there, so maybe it might not have been. So imagine what happens here if the Port or the airport are rendered unusable? Starvation, people without meds, no heating fuel which is a disaster if it’s winter.

I have to imagine that because I live at the end of a tenuous supply chain in a place where certain kinds of natural disasters are expected. We build for those disasters, but even then … roads collapsed all over Anchorage.

You should imagine it for wherever you live because the time for these thoughts is not after the damage has been done. It’s too late to do anything about it then.