Wednesday 7 December 2011

Wednesday writing

Originally my stories were all separate, self-contained tales but as I wrote them I realised they were all about women who fell in love with men they were either friends with, worked with or acquainted with – hence the series’ titles. After discussion with the publisher I decided to separate them into two series as the tone of books one and two (Just Good Friends and The Submission Challenge) was quite different from each other, although with overlapping characters between the series and I conceived the idea of a group of six female friends, three in either series each having their own story.

This worked okay until I got to book five (at the time of writing this blog Friend or Foe is in the final stages of being written) and I realised I needed to do a timeline of when each book starts (which was generally when the previous finished, eg, book 1 Just Good Friends was immediately followed by book 2 The Submission Challenge despite being a different series).

For the reader wanting to know the best order to read the books it is the first one of the Friends series followed by the first one of the Doms series, then second one of the Friends series and so on. You can read each series alone, but if you then start to read the other series you  could come across characters you read about previously and you may be confused to find they are married when they hadn’t even started a relationship yet!

So having decided on a timeline it took quite some jiggling around. Only in one of the books had I specified a time of year (Submissive Training) but there were time factors in some of the books relating to how long it took to publish a book so I was limited to this reality when considering the timeline. There were other items like having stated in Friendly Seduction that one couple were married whilst another were only engaged. Having completed this timeline before I got the edits for the latter book I then added in a bit about it taking place over Christmas time since I now realised that Christmas would have come and gone so had to make some recognition of this.

In future I intend to do a timeline from the beginning – even if it is a stand alone book – listing items like time of year and time scale from start to finish. I’ve probably made some continuity mistakes in the two series mentioned above but it can’t be helped. After all I am still new to writing and each time I write I learn a little bit more about being a writer.

Jennifer

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