“Wrapping up Tales of the Quantum Corps”

In May 2014, I embarked on a new venture for me in the world of publishing.  I uploaded the first episode in Tales of the Quantum Corps to Smashwords.  This title, Johnny Winger and the Serengeti Factor, began a series of books that has spanned six titles and will be drawing to a close in the next year with episode number 7.

As of July 11, 2016, total downloads for the entire series have reached 2870. 

This series has explored the life and adventures of one Johnny Winger, a cadet and later a nanotrooper with United Nation Quantum Corps.  As originally conceived, the series was to cover the exploits of UNQC, Winger and a tiny nanoscale robot called ANAD, a molecular assembler who could build large swarms of copies of itself or anything else it had configuration templates for in short times.  I intended and I think I have achieved a series of stories in which action is king.  I actually had in mind the old Tom Swift Jr. series of scientist-explorers when I originally drew up plans for Tales.  However, Johnny Winger and the Quantum Corps are by design a supra-national military-law enforcement organization.  I hoped to put Winger and ANAD and his fellow nanotroopers into all kinds of adventures, missions, and predicaments with every book.  And pervading the entire series of Tales is the presence of an extraterrestrial race of bots called The Old Ones, who finally reach the Solar System in the last story and we’ll see what happens. 

Now it’s time to bring this series to a close.  In order to do that, I have to allow the Old Ones to come fully into the forefront of the story, which means I have to pin down and define what they really are.  I’ve used them as a sort of myth in previous stories, as well as a religious icon, even a sort of God-image. People have projected their best and worst fantasies on the Old Ones.  But the time has come to be specific about what they are and what they mean to do.

Wrapping up a series means tying up loose ends.  I have a number in Tales of the Quantum Corps.  I have to pin down the exact nature of Johnny Winger himself, who has allowed himself to go through the assimilation process (being deconstructed into a swarm being) so as to fight the Old Ones from within.  I have to elaborate Winger’s relationship, not only with the Old Ones and with Dana Tallant and his fellow nanotroopers, but also with the Doc III bot who now maintains his original identity in a small non-descript file inside the Mother Swarm.  And I have to pin down and explain Johnny Winger’s relationship with himself.  Is he going to stay a swarm being?  Is it even possible for him to come back and become a single-configuration entity again…there are many who doubt this is possible. 

One of the problems of writing a series is that you are increasingly constrained the further you get into the series by what you’ve already written.  You have to keep good notes (I do, generally) and constantly check back on facts and names and dates and stuff.  This is all part of being consistent.  To this continuing effort, you have to add the effort it takes to advance the story, to tell an entertaining story, develop engaging characters and put them in peril. 

So far, about 2800 downloaders feel that I’ve done that. 

I recently found a Writer’s Digest piece by Rachel Scheller that deals with the need for consistency and continuity in writing a series.  Specially, Scheller describes 5 bad habits that writers of series fiction should not fall into:

1.     Oversights - catchall category for anything in a plotline, character, or setting that concerns illogical, unexplainable, or unrealistic courses of action and plot holes, including coincidence contrivance (writer needs it to work and so creates the groundwork on the spot to patch up a means to force it to work) and convenience justifications (it was the only way to make A fit with B, so I had to do it, didn’t I?).

 

2.     Changed Premise - This category includes information given in one episode that directly contradicts information in another. In a series this can be fatal. If your book series has a Changed Premise from one book to the next, readers will lose respect.

 

3.     Technical Problems - If your character always speaks in a certain dialect and suddenly stops in a subsequent book, that’s a technical problem. Names and jobs can also accidentally change through the course of a series. If your character’s hair color or eye color changes, or if he was 6’5″ in the first two books in the series but drops an inch in later stories, you have what may be considered technical problems.

 

4.     Continuity - In a classic Star Trek episode, the creators decided to establish that the Romulans had stolen the design of Klingon ships—so they could use a Klingon ship they’d already created. Not only that, but the Romulans also used Klingon weapons. Cheaper for the creators, yes, but viewers can’t help but groan at these production issues. If you’re doing anything “halfway” with your series simply because it would be a hassle to find a better, more creative way of handling it, you’re making your own production problems. Readers will feel your impatience and probably wonder why you skimped.

 

5.     Unanswered questions - If the author is never going to answer a nagging question, why invest anything, especially time and passion, in the series? Leaving a series arc dangling isn’t something an author can do in a book series unless she sets up the series from the first as an open-ended one that probably won’t have definitive closure. While each book in the series must have satisfactory individual story arc resolutions, all series-arc questions must be answered in the final book of the series or readers will be furious, perhaps enough to ban you as an author for life.

 

I’ll have to deal with each of these matters in wrapping up Tales of the Quantum Corps.  I have my work cut out for me.  Look for Episode 7 in Tales of the Quantum Corps, entitled “Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin,” sometime in the spring of 2017.

 

My next post to the Word Shed will come on July 25.  In this post, we’ll go back and look at what’s coming up for my new SF series The Farpool, which continues to be off to a pretty good start in downloads.

 

See you July 25.

 

Phil B.