Post #244 February 8 2021 “Re-starting an Existing Book Series” Recently, I decided to go back to my series The Farpool Stories and add some additional stories. I have in mind to do three additional novels in this series. Which leads me to today’s message about restarting an existing series. Below are some things you should think about when doing this. BTW, the new titles will be (in order): The Farpool: Plague; The Farpool: Diaspora; and The Farpool: Destiny. 1. The first matter to attend to is the matter of continuity. Continuity means that the characters, the setting and the story and plot of the new series are not radically at variance with what has gone before. There is a logical extrapolation. This should be thought out and well considered before you ever write the first word. In order to ensure this for my stories, I have set myself the task of re-reading all five previous novels. This puts me in the story universe mentally and allows me to take notes on who goes where, what happens to whom, who dies and who prospers. Continuity is important in continuing TV series too, so much so that the production companies often have a continuity editor on staff. Imagine Star Trek without continuity from one episode or series to another…Klingons acting like Romulans, obvious gaffes with warp drives, etc. To put this another way, problems with continuity damage the believability of your story, sometimes irreparably. Your readers want to engage with the story and believe in it, so anything that impedes that is, by definition, bad. 2. The second matter to deal with is character. This is an extension of continuity, but more specific. For my own Farpool Stories, my two main original characters were Chase Meyer and Angie Gilliam. They show up in all the original five novels. But my new series takes places a hundred years after the last of the original novels. I can’t have Chase and Angie at over a hundred years old traipsing around the galaxy and still be believable. So, I’ve invented a new character, Charley Meyer, who is a daughter of Chase and Angie. Having done that, I have to make sure Charley doesn’t do things too much at odds with her parents or upbringing, or at least, have a plausible reason for things that seem out of character. You can see how this is kind of a form of continuity, but it’s important enough to story believability to emphasize it separately. 3. The third item for our concern is conflict, or more specifically my outline and how the plot unfolds. I’m currently in the process of fleshing out my outline (which is to say the plot) for the next story The Farpool: Plague. In my outline, I should be cognizant of what has gone before, enough so that I can continue the story arc in a believable way. This is why I’m reading and taking notes on the previous five novels. I want the new story to be a logical and plausible continuation of what happened in the last of the original stories, The Farpool: Union. Moreover, the basic conflicts in the new story should be organic to the conflicts developed in the original five, perhaps a continuing conflict that has animated all the stories. In my case, an example would be the basic (seemingly unending) conflict between two of the kels, or water clans: the Omtorish and the Ponkti. In many of my stories, the Ponkti are often the villains, the Nazis (if you will) of the Seomish people. I plan to carry this ongoing conflict forward into the new story and probably deepen it. Three elements of re-starting an existing series are continuity, character and conflict. If you’ll attend to these, your re-launch will go a lot more smoothly. The next post to The Word Shed comes on February 15, 2021. See you then. Phil B.