Thinking about first books
It's strange, the impression you get of things. I've been feeling like I'm having to pull teeth to get this novel to start flowing, and that I've not been achieving a lot. Then I look at the wordcount, and realise that in three weeks, I've written around 45,000 words. That's not too bad.
Battle for Odana is a more complex work than the Dream of Asarlai trilogy – it has more point-of-view characters, the world is completely fictional, the concept of the feminine-only power of odana is complicated, there's more storylines. I'm finding it challenging, and that I think is a good thing. I need to keep testing myself as a writer in order to improve.
I'm doing a lot more re-writing at the moment than I thought I would but that makes sense – adding characters, deepening the world means more changes to the plot at first. I'm hoping that the later plot won't need as much changing and I'll be doing more just adding in the bits that are missing from the other characters POV (although I know the end will change too).
I'm thinking about the fact I'm taking a single book and turning it into a duology – particularly, I'm thinking about the pacing required to do that. This is the first time I've written a first book in a continuing storyline – while Dream of Asarlai had an overarching plot that continued from book to book, the majority of the action was self-contained within each volume. I did beginning, middle and ending for each book. Here, I need to write something that is the beginning and middle of a story but not the ending and do it in such a way that's it's both a convincing read itself and will encourage people to get the second half of the story.
So I'm thinking I need to read a few first books in trilogies/duologies, and just the first book. It's not something I normally do – I hate having to wait to finish a story, so while I'll buy books as they come out I'll generally not read until I have the entire trilogy there to continue with. However, I currently have several first books on my TBR shelf, so this is a great time for me to decide to read first books and try to teach myself what works in a first book and what doesn't.
How about for you? When you're reading a first book, what are your expectations? I'd love to know.
