Writing an Episodic Genre Series (part 2 of 3): Episodic Plots and Pacing

Well written and informative.

This past Tuesday, I wrote about how episodic heroes are constructed in contemporary science fiction and fantasy series. While an episodic series relies on that hero, it is each individual book’s plot that keeps the reader turning pages. A good episodic plot will avoid formulaic writing, while providing an escalation in tension so that the reader keeps turning pages. The key to this is to establish momentum, and as the series progresses to vary the structure of each book’s plot. This keeps the reader interested in the book they’re holding in their hands right now, while the hero’s emotional journey (discussed in the next installment) keeps them buying the next book.

Pacing: Hitting the Ground Running

By leaving the character’s backstory off-stage, episodic books typically open with the hero actively starting the adventure. This is a page taken right out of the detective novel playbook. When we first meet

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Maleficent Feels Like Two Different Movies

I love retold fairytales, but Disney didn't do Sleeping Beauty enough justice. Baileypop exclaims it all well.

Inspiration Point

Perfect quote for writers and our passion.

Thoughts on Using Twitter Effectively as an Indie Author

Very informative and surprising for newbies to book promotion

Michael Dalton

After a couple of months of using Twitter to promote my indie author career, I can say with confidence that I’ve learned two things:

Twitter is effective for driving traffic.
Twitter absolutely sucks for selling books.

This may come as a surprise to the many authors I see pushing links to their Amazon book pages non-stop on Twitter, but it’s one based on some fairly solid analytics. And if you’re using Twitter without using any analytics, you’re not really using Twitter, you’re just playing with it.

The first thing you should be doing is tracking your engagement using Twitter’s own tools. Just point your browser to https://ads.twitter.com/user/[your username]. What you’ll see is a list of your tweets, along with charts showing the engagements you got: link clicks, retweets, favorites, and so on. Further, you can click any tweet and it will pop up a summary of everything that happened since…

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10 Black Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists I’d Love to Work With (or work with again)!

Feast your eyes!

Chronicles of Harriet

I write.

I write Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Action and Adventure stories with people of Afrikan descent as the heroes.

Y’all know this.

But what you might not know is I love Science Fiction and Fantasy art and animation and I have been blessed to work with some great artists on the books I have authored and / or edited.

Below is a list of just a few of the Blacktastic artists I will soon work with – again, or for the first time – on a book cover, a graphic novel or an animation project. Enjoy!

Jason Reeves