Rant over modern series writing

(Sarah is a cuckoo—a breed of human-looking cryptid that’s biologically more like a giant wasp than any sort of primate, and telepathic to boot. Evolution is funky sometimes.)

Excerpt From: Seanan McGuire. “Midnight Blue-Light Special.” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/midnight-blue-light-special/id592216584?mt=11

So, at the moment, I’m rereading Midnight Blue-Light Special. And it made me have to say something about why I don’t read a lot of newer series.

There are 3 fundamental approaches to series.

The Discworld Model:

This is for series like Bernie Rhodenbarr, the Rita Mae Brown & Sneakie Pie Brown mysteries, Discworld, Mithgar, and similar. In these (and Mithgar is, quite possibly, the most amazingly perfect example) the books stand alone. There’s little reference to the prior events, or they’re referenced in off-hand manner if relevant to the moment in the same way you or I will make off-hand references to our own pasts. Other than that the book of the moment is pretty thoroughly divorced from the books before and after. You can literally pick up at any point in the series and not be missing anything besides the fun of the other books … which you can just pick up and enjoy as you go.

The Serial Model:

This is the classic Book 1, Book 2, etc model. This is Now & Forever, this is Harry Potter, this is – frankly – most series. This is “To Be Continued” through to “The End”. Sometimes you can muddle through if you pick up part way in. Harry Potter, Little House, and others aren’t nonsense if you pick up later than the beginning, but it helps. Well … Little House might be more of a Discworld Model, now I think of it, but humour me.

The thing with these is that you write them assuming that the person reading book 2 read book 1. If you write something that was explained in book 1 you don’t explain it again, you move on because you’re not worried about confusing anyone because they read book 1 or bloody well best have done.

The Modern Model:

This is one I really don’t like. I’ve read things, namely InCryptid, that use it. But it annoys the hell out of me and the stories have to be very good for me to let it slide and keep going … or you have to not do a very good job of it, thus begging the question of why the author bothered instead of sticking with the Serial Model (possibly the actual case with InCryptid … I’m not actually 100% certain).

In this you try to do the bastardisation of the Discworld Model and the Serial Model. Your books are very “to be continued”, and rely heavily on what came before, but you try to accommodate the ones who are coming in a bit late. Now, some series are a blending of these. Mithgar has Serials (duologies, trilogies, etc) tossed in amongst the larger tapestry of things. Shannara too. But series of Serials is a whole other kettle of popcorn.

I don’t like this one as a reader, nor as a writer. It’s this philosophy that your Serial should be accessible to any and sundry who walk in 5min before the closing credits. That really doesn’t work. You have to insert little obnoxious infodumps that irritate those who have been there since the curtain went up, and unless you want to make your books exponentially thicker by basically reprinting the prior book into the following books –building them into an omnibus edition as you go – you’re going to annoy the mid-streamer who is like “well, she explained this, but why doesn’t she explain that?!”

There. Was I going anywhere with this?

No, not especially. Just saying that I don’t grok the modern method of serialising and it irritates me when I encounter it. All the other crap about the other 2 methods was to illustrate what I meant. Now, back to the book; it has Aeslin Mice in 😍