In the days when I dreamed of writing a book someday, I had this ridiculous notion that once my first book was written, everything would be smooth sailing from then on.
Eleven years after my first book was published, I know better.
Yes, some aspects of writing are easier than they used to be. But a lot of things are still hard and probably always will be. New challenges I didn’t expect always present themselves in each book.
If you’ve dreamed of writing a series, perhaps this account of my struggles with each book will give you courage and help you learn from my mistakes.
SPOILER WARNING: What follows is a cleaned-up version of the notes I took after writing each book and contains mild spoilers of plot and character developments.
Quivers and Quills
What was easy:
Jill’s storyline - Everything she experiences came together quickly and barely changed from what I originally conceived for her in 2002.
Character creation - My sister and I played Robin Hood pretend games for most of our childhood. Since many merry men and their personalities were directly drawn from our childhood games, I never had trouble deciding on the characters and their motivations.
Research - I love the Robin Hood myth, and I’ve read every book about Robin Hood and the Middle Ages that I could get my hands on in the last thirty years. When I started writing this story, I had just visited the ruins of Nottingham Castle and Sherwood Forest, both of which inspired this novel.
What was hard:
Joanna: I had no idea what to do with her. For a while, I even deleted her from the story.
Guy of Gisbourne: I desperately wanted to find a way to redeem Guy, but unfortunately, he wouldn’t turn from his evil ways. That’s when I created Gavin, who pretended to be good for a little while...
Plotting a mystery: Once I decided to make Joanna an amateur detective, I had to retrofit the manuscript with a mystery plot. I don’t recommend doing this because it’s very, very difficult.
Having two main characters: Plotting and keeping straight two main characters, two competing storylines, and two points of view (POV) felt like an organizational and plotting nightmare.
Project management: When you self-publish on a budget, you’re alone. Working with vendors and distribution sites and handling manuscript formatting and website creation while sticking to a schedule was brutal. It was more challenging because I was doing it at night and on weekends while keeping a full-time day job.
Self-publishing when you’ve never done it before is challenging and time-consuming. Learning all the ins and outs of working with a cover designer, formatting the book, and navigating the various distribution sites took hours.
What I learned for the future:
If I’m writing a book with any element of mystery, I should plot the mystery first and then plan the adventure story around it.
Whether plotting or drafting, I write as much as possible from one twin’s perspective before switching to the other. When I do need to switch perspectives, I wait until the next day before doing so. This prevents me from getting confused about whose head I’m supposed to be in.
All the research for a book doesn’t have to be done at once or before one starts writing. I should research only as much as the story requires so I don’t get bogged down in details I’ll never use. (“I need to research that before I can write” is a clever excuse not to write.)
Gold Bars and Tin Stars
What was easy:
I grew up watching and reading Westerns, so I understood the structure and the tropes and had a good idea of what I wanted to do with them.
While I still did a lot of research for the book, I didn’t research so much that it overwhelmed or stalled my writing.
I planned a major plot twist in this book and am still pleased with how I pulled that off.
While I was writing this book, my family and I traveled to Arizona, allowing me to experience several Old West towns and theatrical shootouts, which directly inspired several scenes in the books. Places I visited on the trip and events I witnessed (such as a staged shoot-out at Goldfield Ghost Town) gave me ideas to overcome several story problems I encountered in the draft.
What was hard:
In this book, I introduce a new main character to the series. This character was challenging until I figured out who he was and what role he would play in the series.
I needed significant revision time to shake off my academic writing training (which involved writing complicated, literary, descriptive sentences) and adopt a style more conducive to adventure stories.
What I learned:
While my POV characters were limited to the twins (and Rob when the twins weren’t present), I recognized I had four main series characters now and that each one needed a character arc, not just in this book but in all the books that followed. That meant more planning would be required going forward.
When I wrote the first draft of Quivers, I really thought it would be one book and done. As a result, I didn’t spend enough time building the world of the story. This meant that while writing Gold Bars, I had to retrofit the world-building into what I had already done and start planning how to move forward with the series. The next time I write a series, I’ll do more of that planning with book 1.
While I wanted each book to have tropes unique to the series (for example, Joanna getting rescued), I worried the plots would become too similar. I determined to mix things up in the next book and to conclude the series when I ran out of new ways to tell the stories.
Portals and Poison
What was easy:
I wrote this book while unemployed, so I had plenty of uninterrupted time to think, write, and research. Fellow writers will understand what a luxury it is to devote oneself to a personal writing project full-time.
Since one of the main characters is unemployed in the book, I exorcised some personal job-search demons while writing the first draft.
Creating the fictional country of Pavalonia was a lot more fun than I expected. Returning to Pavalonia or referencing its culture in the series remains a continual source of joy.
What was hard:
The story requires four points of view. Deciding which viewpoint to use for which events and jumping between the heads of four POV characters made me question my sanity. More than once I wondered, “Why do I make writing so hard for myself?”
Jill’s trips to the past don’t follow a neat chronological order. Keeping straight the dates and times she visited and the order in which she experienced them was a challenge.
I struggled to connect with Rob as a main character since his background differed significantly from mine. But once I “discovered” he had a difficult childhood (I had a lovely childhood, by the way), Rob became more sympathetic to me, making writing his perspective easier.
I doubted my ability to write effectively from a male perspective and struggled with the guys’ storyline until I wrote the scene where they were tied up in the barn. That was the moment when everything about their relationship clicked for me. Once that scene was written, I rewrote their scenes to lead up to and naturally flow from that interaction.
What I learned:
Having four POV characters in one novel is difficult. In the future, I plan to limit the point of view to the twins unless there is a strong and compelling reason to tell the story from another character’s POV.
If I write a story with multiple timelines, I have to plan each one carefully and write one timeline at a time. After each timeline is written, I reorder the scenes to fit with all the other timelines and scenes (like reshuffling a deck of cards–I can’t do it until all the cards exist).
Inkwells and Jail Cells
What was easy:
I knew my four main characters well and created situations that played to their strengths, weaknesses, and relationships with other characters.
I had been plotting Frank and Elizabeth’s involvement in this book for quite some time, so I had a good idea of their characters, motivations, and actions and was excited to include them.
The outline for my rough draft came together easily. That original outline remains the plot of the published book with almost no changes, something that rarely happens to me.
What was hard:
I had quite a few personal difficulties while writing this manuscript. Unfortunately, the more tumultuous my personal life is, the more challenges I experience in my fiction writing.
My dad died in 2014. Writing Frank into this book in 2018 and thinking about my dad was bittersweet in ways I hadn’t anticipated and re-opened my grief.
Frank and Elizabeth almost ran away with this book. I had given so much thought to what they were doing that the two of them took valuable page time away from the twins.
I enjoy working with a large cast of characters, but the cast for this book was almost too big to manage. I had to keep looking for ways to separate the group so I could work with fewer characters in each scene.
The first draft of this book is the worst first draft I’ve ever written–no kidding. During the intensive revision process, I seriously doubted if there was anything in the book worth saving.
What I learned:
When I have too many characters, I have to find logical reasons to reduce the number of characters in a scene; otherwise, writing a dialogue between eight or more characters is very difficult–if not impossible.
I will always write messy first drafts, and that’s okay. Now, when other authors talk about how they can write clean first drafts that only require minor revision before publication, I plug my ears and remind myself that the only writing process I should worry about is my own.
Forcing myself to write a scene when I’m not ready to write a scene is pointless. I forced myself to finish the last 20% of the book by a deadline even though I wasn’t ready. I then spent 80% of my revision time on the last 20% of the book. Forcing an ending before the book was ready wasted my time.
Serpents and Sharks
What was easy:
All the world-building, character development, and planning I had done for previous books paid off in this book because I had resources I could refer back to rather than having to make things up.
I had never written a MacGuffin plot before, and I found, to my delight, that it’s much easier to plot than a mystery.
I played with my usual structure and tropes to try to do something different that still stayed true to the spirit of the series and gave the characters a chance to grow.
What was hard:
I had too many villains and had to reduce their numbers and vary their levels of villainy, a more difficult task than I had presumed it would be.
This book has a third POV character who is also a main character (at least in this book). I needed three revisions to get that character to a place where she was sympathetic enough that you didn't want to push her off a cliff.
In my outline, I purposefully put the twins in situations out of their comfort zones. In so doing, I sometimes struggled to find ways to have the twins stay in character while handling the new situations.
This book went through three significant revisions before it had an ending.
What I learned:
If an ending isn’t working, the problem likely comes much earlier in the story. Fix the earlier problem first before trying to force an ending.
Writing a draft backward actually works, especially when 75% of the book is written. I knew the outline of the final chapter, but I couldn’t figure out how to get there. To trick my brain into finding a logical conclusion to the story, I wrote the last chapter first and then wrote backward, one chapter at a time, until I found a way to make what I was writing fit into what I had already written.
The ending makes all the difference. Before the ending was written, I hated this manuscript. Once I had an ending, my feelings about the time book became more positive.
Not every single scene must play out in real-time for the reader. Sometimes, summarizing a plot point is the best way to handle it. Regardless of what the writing books say, telling can be better than showing in the right circumstances.
Joyriders
What was easy:
Making the main characters middle-aged: Writing about 20 and 30 years olds when I’m middle-aged has required me to think about how my own life has changed in the last 20 years, so it wasn’t hard to imagine how the twins and their husbands had changed over time and yet remained the same.
Revisiting Sherwood: I’d been looking for a way to get the characters back to Sherwood, and it was so much fun to revisit the merry men and continue their adventures.
Rob and Robin Hood looking alike: I’d been planning a way to make this detail pay off for years, and I was delighted to finally explore what it would be like for Jill to have briefly dated the famous outlaw but now be married to his twenty-first-century doppelganger. Everything I wrote for this storyline was sheer joy.
What was hard:
I encountered many issues with my health, my day job, and my family that made my everyday life quite dramatic, which meant I had very little energy or will to create drama on the page.
Plotting the part 2: The main characters of part 2 visited so many times and overlapped the part 1 storylines so much that I struggled to work it all out.
Writing about the same event from two different perspectives: While it was necessary to show different perspectives of the same events, I had to stop in each scene and determine what added value I could bring to the second telling. This is the most complex writing challenge I’ve ever given myself.
Making sure I closed all the time loops in the story and the series: I had pages of notes of things I needed to wrap up. In the first draft, I closed every single time loop but then realized that readers wouldn’t care, and I needed to choose judiciously what time loops to close for the reader and which ones to delete (even though I knew how they resolved for my satisfaction).
Keeping a consistent tone with the rest of the series: My first draft was pretty dark due to all the personal drama I was experiencing. A lot of editing was required to make the tone of this manuscript consistent with the tone of the other books in the series.
What I learned:
If the old way isn’t working, try something new. This seems like common sense, but trying something new is a lot harder than it looks. None of my previous writing techniques helped me finish this book. I had to create new ones.
How to use unreliable narrators: I’d always wanted to try writing unreliable narrators, and actually doing it was so much fun!
Endings must be satisfying–which is a lot harder than you think. I spent a lot of time thinking about what ending would be best for each character and then coordinating all those endings for each character to make it so.
It’s okay to end something: I am fond of these characters and their stories. So much of this series is tied up in in-jokes with my family, personal experience, and things I’m passionate about. But everything has to end eventually, and it took courage to say this was the end.
I need to write shorter books. This was my longest book so far, which is part of why it took so long to write, revise, and publish. I've got to find a way to write shorter books so I don't exhaust myself in the process.
Eleven years after my first book was published, I know better.
Yes, some aspects of writing are easier than they used to be. But a lot of things are still hard and probably always will be. New challenges I didn’t expect always present themselves in each book.
If you’ve dreamed of writing a series, perhaps this account of my struggles with each book will give you courage and help you learn from my mistakes.
SPOILER WARNING: What follows is a cleaned-up version of the notes I took after writing each book and contains mild spoilers of plot and character developments.
Quivers and Quills
What was easy:
Jill’s storyline - Everything she experiences came together quickly and barely changed from what I originally conceived for her in 2002.
Character creation - My sister and I played Robin Hood pretend games for most of our childhood. Since many merry men and their personalities were directly drawn from our childhood games, I never had trouble deciding on the characters and their motivations.
Research - I love the Robin Hood myth, and I’ve read every book about Robin Hood and the Middle Ages that I could get my hands on in the last thirty years. When I started writing this story, I had just visited the ruins of Nottingham Castle and Sherwood Forest, both of which inspired this novel.
What was hard:
Joanna: I had no idea what to do with her. For a while, I even deleted her from the story.
Guy of Gisbourne: I desperately wanted to find a way to redeem Guy, but unfortunately, he wouldn’t turn from his evil ways. That’s when I created Gavin, who pretended to be good for a little while...
Plotting a mystery: Once I decided to make Joanna an amateur detective, I had to retrofit the manuscript with a mystery plot. I don’t recommend doing this because it’s very, very difficult.
Having two main characters: Plotting and keeping straight two main characters, two competing storylines, and two points of view (POV) felt like an organizational and plotting nightmare.
Project management: When you self-publish on a budget, you’re alone. Working with vendors and distribution sites and handling manuscript formatting and website creation while sticking to a schedule was brutal. It was more challenging because I was doing it at night and on weekends while keeping a full-time day job.
Self-publishing when you’ve never done it before is challenging and time-consuming. Learning all the ins and outs of working with a cover designer, formatting the book, and navigating the various distribution sites took hours.
What I learned for the future:
If I’m writing a book with any element of mystery, I should plot the mystery first and then plan the adventure story around it.
Whether plotting or drafting, I write as much as possible from one twin’s perspective before switching to the other. When I do need to switch perspectives, I wait until the next day before doing so. This prevents me from getting confused about whose head I’m supposed to be in.
All the research for a book doesn’t have to be done at once or before one starts writing. I should research only as much as the story requires so I don’t get bogged down in details I’ll never use. (“I need to research that before I can write” is a clever excuse not to write.)
Gold Bars and Tin Stars
What was easy:
I grew up watching and reading Westerns, so I understood the structure and the tropes and had a good idea of what I wanted to do with them.
While I still did a lot of research for the book, I didn’t research so much that it overwhelmed or stalled my writing.
I planned a major plot twist in this book and am still pleased with how I pulled that off.
While I was writing this book, my family and I traveled to Arizona, allowing me to experience several Old West towns and theatrical shootouts, which directly inspired several scenes in the books. Places I visited on the trip and events I witnessed (such as a staged shoot-out at Goldfield Ghost Town) gave me ideas to overcome several story problems I encountered in the draft.
What was hard:
In this book, I introduce a new main character to the series. This character was challenging until I figured out who he was and what role he would play in the series.
I needed significant revision time to shake off my academic writing training (which involved writing complicated, literary, descriptive sentences) and adopt a style more conducive to adventure stories.
What I learned:
While my POV characters were limited to the twins (and Rob when the twins weren’t present), I recognized I had four main series characters now and that each one needed a character arc, not just in this book but in all the books that followed. That meant more planning would be required going forward.
When I wrote the first draft of Quivers, I really thought it would be one book and done. As a result, I didn’t spend enough time building the world of the story. This meant that while writing Gold Bars, I had to retrofit the world-building into what I had already done and start planning how to move forward with the series. The next time I write a series, I’ll do more of that planning with book 1.
While I wanted each book to have tropes unique to the series (for example, Joanna getting rescued), I worried the plots would become too similar. I determined to mix things up in the next book and to conclude the series when I ran out of new ways to tell the stories.
Portals and Poison
What was easy:
I wrote this book while unemployed, so I had plenty of uninterrupted time to think, write, and research. Fellow writers will understand what a luxury it is to devote oneself to a personal writing project full-time.
Since one of the main characters is unemployed in the book, I exorcised some personal job-search demons while writing the first draft.
Creating the fictional country of Pavalonia was a lot more fun than I expected. Returning to Pavalonia or referencing its culture in the series remains a continual source of joy.
What was hard:
The story requires four points of view. Deciding which viewpoint to use for which events and jumping between the heads of four POV characters made me question my sanity. More than once I wondered, “Why do I make writing so hard for myself?”
Jill’s trips to the past don’t follow a neat chronological order. Keeping straight the dates and times she visited and the order in which she experienced them was a challenge.
I struggled to connect with Rob as a main character since his background differed significantly from mine. But once I “discovered” he had a difficult childhood (I had a lovely childhood, by the way), Rob became more sympathetic to me, making writing his perspective easier.
I doubted my ability to write effectively from a male perspective and struggled with the guys’ storyline until I wrote the scene where they were tied up in the barn. That was the moment when everything about their relationship clicked for me. Once that scene was written, I rewrote their scenes to lead up to and naturally flow from that interaction.
What I learned:
Having four POV characters in one novel is difficult. In the future, I plan to limit the point of view to the twins unless there is a strong and compelling reason to tell the story from another character’s POV.
If I write a story with multiple timelines, I have to plan each one carefully and write one timeline at a time. After each timeline is written, I reorder the scenes to fit with all the other timelines and scenes (like reshuffling a deck of cards–I can’t do it until all the cards exist).
Inkwells and Jail Cells
What was easy:
I knew my four main characters well and created situations that played to their strengths, weaknesses, and relationships with other characters.
I had been plotting Frank and Elizabeth’s involvement in this book for quite some time, so I had a good idea of their characters, motivations, and actions and was excited to include them.
The outline for my rough draft came together easily. That original outline remains the plot of the published book with almost no changes, something that rarely happens to me.
What was hard:
I had quite a few personal difficulties while writing this manuscript. Unfortunately, the more tumultuous my personal life is, the more challenges I experience in my fiction writing.
My dad died in 2014. Writing Frank into this book in 2018 and thinking about my dad was bittersweet in ways I hadn’t anticipated and re-opened my grief.
Frank and Elizabeth almost ran away with this book. I had given so much thought to what they were doing that the two of them took valuable page time away from the twins.
I enjoy working with a large cast of characters, but the cast for this book was almost too big to manage. I had to keep looking for ways to separate the group so I could work with fewer characters in each scene.
The first draft of this book is the worst first draft I’ve ever written–no kidding. During the intensive revision process, I seriously doubted if there was anything in the book worth saving.
What I learned:
When I have too many characters, I have to find logical reasons to reduce the number of characters in a scene; otherwise, writing a dialogue between eight or more characters is very difficult–if not impossible.
I will always write messy first drafts, and that’s okay. Now, when other authors talk about how they can write clean first drafts that only require minor revision before publication, I plug my ears and remind myself that the only writing process I should worry about is my own.
Forcing myself to write a scene when I’m not ready to write a scene is pointless. I forced myself to finish the last 20% of the book by a deadline even though I wasn’t ready. I then spent 80% of my revision time on the last 20% of the book. Forcing an ending before the book was ready wasted my time.
Serpents and Sharks
What was easy:
All the world-building, character development, and planning I had done for previous books paid off in this book because I had resources I could refer back to rather than having to make things up.
I had never written a MacGuffin plot before, and I found, to my delight, that it’s much easier to plot than a mystery.
I played with my usual structure and tropes to try to do something different that still stayed true to the spirit of the series and gave the characters a chance to grow.
What was hard:
I had too many villains and had to reduce their numbers and vary their levels of villainy, a more difficult task than I had presumed it would be.
This book has a third POV character who is also a main character (at least in this book). I needed three revisions to get that character to a place where she was sympathetic enough that you didn't want to push her off a cliff.
In my outline, I purposefully put the twins in situations out of their comfort zones. In so doing, I sometimes struggled to find ways to have the twins stay in character while handling the new situations.
This book went through three significant revisions before it had an ending.
What I learned:
If an ending isn’t working, the problem likely comes much earlier in the story. Fix the earlier problem first before trying to force an ending.
Writing a draft backward actually works, especially when 75% of the book is written. I knew the outline of the final chapter, but I couldn’t figure out how to get there. To trick my brain into finding a logical conclusion to the story, I wrote the last chapter first and then wrote backward, one chapter at a time, until I found a way to make what I was writing fit into what I had already written.
The ending makes all the difference. Before the ending was written, I hated this manuscript. Once I had an ending, my feelings about the time book became more positive.
Not every single scene must play out in real-time for the reader. Sometimes, summarizing a plot point is the best way to handle it. Regardless of what the writing books say, telling can be better than showing in the right circumstances.
Joyriders
What was easy:
Making the main characters middle-aged: Writing about 20 and 30 years olds when I’m middle-aged has required me to think about how my own life has changed in the last 20 years, so it wasn’t hard to imagine how the twins and their husbands had changed over time and yet remained the same.
Revisiting Sherwood: I’d been looking for a way to get the characters back to Sherwood, and it was so much fun to revisit the merry men and continue their adventures.
Rob and Robin Hood looking alike: I’d been planning a way to make this detail pay off for years, and I was delighted to finally explore what it would be like for Jill to have briefly dated the famous outlaw but now be married to his twenty-first-century doppelganger. Everything I wrote for this storyline was sheer joy.
What was hard:
I encountered many issues with my health, my day job, and my family that made my everyday life quite dramatic, which meant I had very little energy or will to create drama on the page.
Plotting the part 2: The main characters of part 2 visited so many times and overlapped the part 1 storylines so much that I struggled to work it all out.
Writing about the same event from two different perspectives: While it was necessary to show different perspectives of the same events, I had to stop in each scene and determine what added value I could bring to the second telling. This is the most complex writing challenge I’ve ever given myself.
Making sure I closed all the time loops in the story and the series: I had pages of notes of things I needed to wrap up. In the first draft, I closed every single time loop but then realized that readers wouldn’t care, and I needed to choose judiciously what time loops to close for the reader and which ones to delete (even though I knew how they resolved for my satisfaction).
Keeping a consistent tone with the rest of the series: My first draft was pretty dark due to all the personal drama I was experiencing. A lot of editing was required to make the tone of this manuscript consistent with the tone of the other books in the series.
What I learned:
If the old way isn’t working, try something new. This seems like common sense, but trying something new is a lot harder than it looks. None of my previous writing techniques helped me finish this book. I had to create new ones.
How to use unreliable narrators: I’d always wanted to try writing unreliable narrators, and actually doing it was so much fun!
Endings must be satisfying–which is a lot harder than you think. I spent a lot of time thinking about what ending would be best for each character and then coordinating all those endings for each character to make it so.
It’s okay to end something: I am fond of these characters and their stories. So much of this series is tied up in in-jokes with my family, personal experience, and things I’m passionate about. But everything has to end eventually, and it took courage to say this was the end.
I need to write shorter books. This was my longest book so far, which is part of why it took so long to write, revise, and publish. I've got to find a way to write shorter books so I don't exhaust myself in the process.
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