The Stories I Didn't Know You Wanted

One of the best parts of being an indie author who answers only to herself and her readers is the freedom to throw aside convention and head down the roads rarely taken, particularly the surprising ones you didn’t realize Were Things. This is something I’ve had on my mind lately post-Major Pieces… because not only did that Kickstarter do amazingly well, but the reviews being left on retailers for the book have been… illuminating. There’s a lot of “Yes! I love these small stories/interstitial bits!” and “I don’t care what length she writes I just want her to write whatever!”

Engage Jaguar Thoughtful-face.

After I finished Princes’ Game, I sat down to decide what I wanted to do next in the Peltedverse. I had a lot of characters I’d spent a great deal of time building into major players, and the Chatcaavan-not-a-war felt less like a resolution of their plotlines and prep for something larger... but I worried about what it would take to exercise those talents. At all costs I wanted to avoid turning the setting into a ‘the universe is dangerous and dark and only the constant work of powerful people keeps the darkness at bay!’ situation… but as most authors of long-running series will tell you, it’s kind of hard not to trash your universe looking for a bad guy big enough to challenge your uber-powerful good guys.

I needed to keep writing, and I needed it to stay true to my artistic needs. So in an act that will surprise few of my long-time readers, I decided to go back to the roots of the Peltedverse. As a teen the Big Conflict I’d planned for was not the one with the Chatcaava, but something else, and I had cheerfully been scattering breadcrumbs all over the canon to lay in the foundations for it. The more I examined this idea, the more I felt it would serve as a proper response to the development of my major characters… and its conclusion resolved their growth arcs in a satisfying way.

So I committed full-on to this Second Big Conflict, found all those breadcrumbs, and started laying in the more obvious foreshadowing in the post-Princes’ Game books. Great! I had a plan. But I was also aware that if I wasn’t careful, I was going to get to the end of this Second Great Conflict and think ‘now what.’

Except now I know, don’t I?

If I was a normal sort of tradpub author, working in an accepted paradigm, my next set of books would be Surela’s, which start 7 years or so after the end of Laisrathera. All the interstitial stuff that happens between Jubilee Summer’s conclusion in Farmer’s Crown and the beginning of An Exile Aboard Ship (Surela 1) would exist as backstory for that first book in Surela’s trilogy. I wouldn’t bother to write all the little stories between here and there because they don’t fit a marketing niche. They’re not adventure SF. They’re not space opera. They’re not message/literary SF. They’re this weird slice-of-life-in-the-future thing that you all have indicated that you really enjoy. And that… I enjoy too. You all taught me with Major Pieces that you’re just as interested (and some of you more interested) in the interstitial stories than I thought… and I can see dozens of interstitial stories in that setting. I like the idea of rounding out the setting so that it includes more of the everyday struggles as well as the galaxy-spanning ones.

My plan then, is to launch and wrap up that Next Epic Conflict in the next five years or so (I’m going to need a lot of books, ‘everyday’ and event-related, to get there, but about 5 years of 4-6 books a year should do it). And after that, I’m going to let the Peltedverse coast on quieter stories. Things like the development of the relationship between the Guardkin and the Eldritch. Children growing up in an alien multicultural society. The cultural growing pains of Fleet. The adventures of particular people living their lives. I still want to write crazy epic struggles against all odds, and probably will—in other series, or in standalone series/books. But it will be nice to avoid subjecting the Peltedverse to the urge to power-up its conflicts. I can let that setting be what I’d originally conceived, which was a Star Trek-like setting of normal people doing cool stuff in the future without having to worry about evil empires or dark forces crashing over everything…! And I am grateful that I am free to make these choices. Indie doesn’t seem to work for some people, but it was the best possible path for me.

Having said all this… remember that I always want to know what you want to hear about: the characters you love, the situations that interest you, the conflicts and challenges that you don’t want me to skip. Don’t be afraid to drop me a line!