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that tricky balance
May. 3rd, 2007 03:14 pmLast weekend was my writer's group, and I passed the first chapter of Miledrop past them. Chapter one is a pretty action-oriented intro to Cori, one of my two main characters for this story. Chapter two is where we meed the other (probably primary) main character, Daran.
Now, Daran also happened to be a very minor character in Novel The First.
Miledrop is not intended in any way to be a sequel to Farewell To Io, but it IS set on the same world about half a year after the events in the first novel. The aftereffects of those events would still be being felt even at this time, and even though Daran lives in a different city than where most of the main events took place he was still there for just enough of the action to make it impossible to ignore.
The first tricksy thing is finding a balance of clueing in some of the past without making the book FEEL like a sequel.
The second tricksy thing is that some of the other characters from Novel the First want to come play, and that makes the above problem even more of a challenge.
I dunno whether it's a reader preference thing, but I hate picking up a book and immediately getting the sense that I need to have read something else first to truly get it. And since I haven't sold Novel The First yet (426 days! Still sane!) it's even more important to not have this hinge too much on stuff that nobody may ever see.
At the same time, all my stuff (with the exception of my fantasy stuff and one SF story I haven't sold yet) is in a single contiguous universe, and roughly contemporaneous to each other (or at least could be pinpointed relative to one another on a timeline, if you knew what key things to look for). I've got a whole lot of worldbuilding behind my stuff and there's a hell of a lot of cross-connects, so there's always going to be ties from any new thing to old things, and small glimpses of what's next too.
So, for those of you who write stuff that are discrete stories set in a single universe, how do you maintain that balance, or do you assiduously avoid letting works cross-pollinate? As a reader, what strategies of this sort makes you crazy?
Now, Daran also happened to be a very minor character in Novel The First.
Miledrop is not intended in any way to be a sequel to Farewell To Io, but it IS set on the same world about half a year after the events in the first novel. The aftereffects of those events would still be being felt even at this time, and even though Daran lives in a different city than where most of the main events took place he was still there for just enough of the action to make it impossible to ignore.
The first tricksy thing is finding a balance of clueing in some of the past without making the book FEEL like a sequel.
The second tricksy thing is that some of the other characters from Novel the First want to come play, and that makes the above problem even more of a challenge.
I dunno whether it's a reader preference thing, but I hate picking up a book and immediately getting the sense that I need to have read something else first to truly get it. And since I haven't sold Novel The First yet (426 days! Still sane!) it's even more important to not have this hinge too much on stuff that nobody may ever see.
At the same time, all my stuff (with the exception of my fantasy stuff and one SF story I haven't sold yet) is in a single contiguous universe, and roughly contemporaneous to each other (or at least could be pinpointed relative to one another on a timeline, if you knew what key things to look for). I've got a whole lot of worldbuilding behind my stuff and there's a hell of a lot of cross-connects, so there's always going to be ties from any new thing to old things, and small glimpses of what's next too.
So, for those of you who write stuff that are discrete stories set in a single universe, how do you maintain that balance, or do you assiduously avoid letting works cross-pollinate? As a reader, what strategies of this sort makes you crazy?
