The escalation problem

The comments on the last post started getting into endings and the escalation of threat, particularly as related to series books, and I discovered I had quite a lot to say on the subject even though I haven't written a long-running series myself.

The first thing is that not all trilogies or series are the same. Some are accidental - the writer wrote a book that was supposed to be a stand-alone, and then everyone wanted more, more, more. Some are episodic - monster/murder/McGuffin-of-the-week (...