Story arcs

I'm on a long coach ride back from Milford Sound in the south island of New Zealand. It's dark now, so tricky reading my kindle (and I need to download another book when we get back to some free wifi anyway), and the time spent unsuccessfully trying to nap has got me thinking about what to do about my next book.

The question is: how to continue my previous one as the second part of a series without ending it too similarly in order to ensure a continuance of the overall story into a third and final book? Actually the better question is whether to start a second book at all. My first is only available on Kindle, yet to get a review to become more "findable", has only sold about 20 copies in its first month, and I'm still hoping kindle sales and the very positive feedback on Authonomy will someday lead to an agent and a print version (honestly, I didn't set out to get so absorbed in promoting my work and fighting to get it on non-digital bookshelves).

But I digress. Supposing I do start writing a second book for the same reason as I did the first - that I had an idea I wanted to give some life (and some legs) to. How far should I take it? Do I dare step further towards the realms of sci-fi by revealing more of the "magical" side to the backstory I have rolling around my imagination? Or do I keep one foot and a couple of toes firmly in the real world by hinting at the fantastical and limiting the sci-fi to our hero's emerging abilities?

There must come a point, surely, when I'm going to have to let the genie out the bottle and reveal all with where I've been going with all this. But how early do I reveal the entrance to the rabbit hole, and how far down it do I take the reader in the second of three (or indeed the third)?

I'm sure feedback on the whole novel (as material uploaded to Authonomy is free, I've only included the first 20k words or so) will help guide me, and let me know if I was on the right track with the right balance and mixture. But I guess until then, I may have to let the basic plot for the second part of my "Order of the Nexus" arc continue to  bubble away, uncomitted to screen for a while.

As always, and with the hope of some back ansd forth;  what say you?

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