Post #224 August 10 2020 “Johnny Winger and the End of a Series” Early this year, I began a new series called Quantum Troopers Return, starring an old character of mine named Johnny Winger. I described the series this way: Colonel Johnny Winger, now a Para-Human Swarm Entity or angel, returns with UN Quantum Corps, a quirky nanobot named ANAD and the quantum troopers of 1st Nanospace Battalion to fight the criminal cartel Red Harmony and try to defeat their nefarious, illegal and highly profitable efforts to spread unlicensed fabs, rogue DNA and bad nano both around the world and off Earth. As of this writing, the end of this series is near. I have completed 8 of the planned 10 episodes and have uploaded 6 of them online. The last of the series will be uploaded this November. I intend for this to be Johnny Winger’s swan song. Winger (let’s call him JW, though I don’t think he would appreciate that) appears in 6 novels (Tales of the Quantum Corps), some 22 episodes of Quantum Troopers and now 10 episodes of Quantum Troopers Return. I have mixed feelings about saying goodbye though I think it is the right thing to do. Any creator of series characters and stories faces the same dilemma. I always conceived of JW as a sort of latter-day Tom Swift Jr, without the blond crewcut and the white bread aphorisms. Tom Swift Jr was a creature of American literature from the 50s and 60s. JW was a creature of the 90s and early 21st century. I always envisioned him as a man of action, perhaps more action that thought. I imagined him as a dedicated quantum trooper, possessed of a keen sense of mission, though not quite a Boy Scout. I dropped bits and pieces of his background into the stories: born on a ranch in Colorado, mom dying in a car crash at a young age, his Dad a sort of frustrated tinkerer-inventor, suffering post-accident depression. To get away from ranch and small-town life, he signed up with United Nations Quantum Corps and the rest of history. It turned out that JW was a natural atomgrabber, highly skilled by nature at maneuvering around in the world of atoms and molecules. Later in the series Quantum Troopers, I have JW suffering disassembly by rogue enemy nanobot swarms and being reconstructed as an angel, a para-human swarm entity, a role he plays in my last series. But now I feel it’s time to have JW drift off into the sunset. One decision that every series writer faces is whether to have his main character grow and/or change during the series, and by how much. There are good points on either side of this argument. If he does evolve and grow or change, that may well keep readers more interested in how he turns out. What challenges will he face and how will he meet them? On the other hand, keeping the main character more or less static (like Tom Swift) means his personality and behaviors are more predictable, and that can be comforting to many readers as well. It’s a judgment call. Continuity in a series is important, if the characters are continuing as they are in my stories. This means the writer needs to keep a ‘bible’ of notes about the characters. More than once, I’ve written about a character only to discover that I actually killed him off several episodes earlier (or even in a previous series). That’s embarrassing. I also faced the obvious problem of having to continue to create ever-more complicated plots, settings and challenges for JW and his troopers, a difficulty which has made ending my twenty-year love affair with JW a little easier. Continuity is important, even critical (ask television series writers about that) and attending to it helps keep things straight and more important, believable, for the reader. Is there any future for Johnny Winger? Not in any way that I can foresee, and certainly in any way as a main character. My next effort is an alternate-history novel to be called The Eureka Gambit. After that, I hope to return to the world of The Farpool Stories. JW doesn’t appear in any of these. Therefore, I must say adieu to JW. Johnny Winger…R.I.P. The next post to The Word Shed comes on August 17. See you then. Phil B.