The Fun and potential failures of writing multiple series at once

Welcome to 2024! Time is precious this year, so I’ll cut to the chase.

Today I want to talk about my process of writing multiple book series at once. Why I’m doing it, what’s fun about it and what’s been really bending my mind.

At the time of writing this, I have two novels and a novella out. Two in one series (The Flux Catastrophe) and one in another (The First Hytharo.) Both are set in the same fictional world of The Droughtlands, the latter thirty years after the former.

The bit where this all starts to get complicated is that, despite the time span between them, the events in one effect the other. The repercussions of The Flux Catastrophe are felt in The First Hytharo, and the events that take place in The First Hytharo will lend new perspectives and detail to The Flux Catastrophe.

This is something that will become increasingly prominent this year, with books two and three of The Flux Catastrophe being set to release across 2024, with the sequel to The Hytharo Redux to come out between them.

Sounds convoluted, so you’re probably wondering why I’m doing this to you. (And by extension, myself.)

This all goes back to how Molten Flux and The Hytharo Redux were initially written. I’ve spoken about it on the blog before, but I’ll give you a quick re-cap. Started in 2015, The Hytharo Redux was my first foray into The Droughtlands, following a very different Spiric as he embarked on a very different quest for his memories. As I quickly found out, the concept wasn’t working. A boy walking around a thousand years after his time only makes for an interesting protagonist if I could find a way to make his time relate to the present.

Back then, I couldn’t.

I had to put Spiric to the back of my mind, but I wasn’t quite ready to leave The Droughtlands. The focus of that initial draft of the story had strayed towards Kretatics and their mechanical arcanites, along with grand battles with cumbersome rifles. It was a setting that Spiric simply wouldn’t fit in, so I was lucky when Ryza came along instead. That was back in 2017, and between advancing my career through Microsoft, I was fully focused on writing and re-drafting what would eventually become Molten Flux.

There were a few cursory attempts at revisiting Spiric’s story but it wasn’t until 2022 that the path ahead struck me like a bolt of lightning. By then, Molten Flux had undergone a few rounds of heavy structural rewrites, and had failed to pick up a literary agent to represent it to publishers. As life events happened, I realised that I wouldn’t be happy having these blood-sweat-and-tears-filled works be at the mercy of agents and publishers, who could decide whether the entire series would live or die by a number on a screen.

Self-publishing, and the control it brought, came as my saviour, and I was presented with a dilemma. Conventional advice is to start and then finish one series at a time, as readers are more drawn towards completed book series, wary of being burned by authors that never get around to releasing that crucial, final book.

The problem with that is that I’d then be sitting on a complete and ready-to-go book for a matter of years! Sure, I could release one of them as a stand-alone. Molten Flux was originally supposed to be one.

But I’m a weirdo and decided to pick a third path, one that I hadn’t really heard done before (probably because it’s a pretty crazy move to begin with.)

By alternating the series in which I write and release my books, I reap a few benefits.

First, I don’t burn out on one story. My current release schedule has me putting out a new novel every four months or so, meaning that between books, I’d only have FOUR months to write, edit and market the next book. However this is impossible, as it doesn’t factor in the time where I don’t have my hands on the book, where other editors, or proofreaders or advanced readers need to be given time to be done with it.

Alternating releases means I get more time to think about each different series’ sequel while I’m writing, and can come at each one with a fresh view of what’s important to them. For a series like The First Hytharo, which I intend to be five books in length, I’d probably get sick of writing them if I had to do them back to back.

Thinking about the series in this way also makes it easier to interlock them. By alternating, I can better weave references between them into the story itself. If I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to attempt years of foresight in order for one series to properly play into another.

While I can’t share EXACTLY what I mean, I’ll tell you that it will become more clear once you’ve read BLAZING FLUX, which will be releasing 2nd of April, 2024.

In fact, that’s the reason I’m writing about this subject today. BLAZING FLUX is the first book I’ve written that really starts to play into this concept, and the next book in The First Hytharo series will only continue this.

I will admit it’s a bit of a headache to design how these things will play. The intention is that each series can still be read alone, all the way through before moving onto the next, OR that they can be read in the order that I’m releasing them to catch those other references. Because of the time span between the two books, some of these references have to be quite veiled. Some exist to hint at events that’ve already happened, but they can’t go so far as to spoil what happened.

Keeping the narrative tension while doing this is a very fine line to walk. Narrative tension relies on the reader wanting to know what happens next, but when a certainty in the world appears, say, in the form of a character having previously appeared in a story set in the future, the narrative tension for them must be refocused.

It’s a surety that they’ll survive, because they must live to appear again, so the tension now lies in HOW the character will get there, or what they’ll need to sacrifice in order to survive. It can even bring new interpretations to a character’s motivations, where a reader will (hopefully) wonder what event will change that character into the version they first met in another book.

However, as time goes on, I am very aware at how tenuous this balancing act will become. I plan to throw two more series into this mix, meaning there are more opportunities to trap myself in a certainty.

If you’ve read THE HYTHARO REDUX, you’ll understand how perilous that can be.

I think I just find the “magic” of a surety to be intriguing. It’s something that het characters of the book aren’t aware of, an enchantment cast by the writer and then the reader. Sure, a certainty be a solid fact that a reader can use to leap to the conclusion of a plot point, but what does that mean for the other elements around it? The still open-ended lifespans that dwell in the same world as these supposed Nexus-6 models (a Blade Runner reference to a fixed/certain lifespan). Does their uncertainty make them disposable for the purpose of the plot? Are they less important that the things you’ve seen before? The basis of fact that the reader knows?

They seem like pointless questions for any other book, but when the basis of the magic of The Droughtlands —pure resonance, the magic that wiped out those-of-glass— is predicated on certainty, what effect does a reader’s own certainty have on their own interpretations and experiences of the story they’re taking part in?

The answer isn’t one I can put into words here. Instead, the first part of it lies within the pages of BLAZING FLUX, which, again, you can read from the 2nd of April, 2024.

As time goes on and I release more books, more of these questions will be given answers, not through words but the experience you have as a reader as you discover them.