I am in the thick of things where it comes to completing the Nora Grayson series, and because writing is a constant learning process I thought I would share some things that are helping me get through this final book.
For those just joining us, the Nora Grayson series is my urban fantasy/paranormal/fantasy mystery series that follows Miss Nora Grayson, an empathic wizard living in Boston. It is honestly difficult to place in a single genre here, which I know will have professionals screaming at me that I just don’t know my market the way I should and that I should study it more, but if you read the books you’re going to see why I am so fickle.
Suffice, sometimes you’re on Earth and sometimes you’re in Fairy. Magic is hidden in plain sight of humanity, but I don’t have any fully human characters on the page, and the ties that bind Fairy to Earth are very, very important. Especially in this last book.
It’s weird. I know. But so far readers seem to be enjoying the books so I’m just going to keep trucking along with it.
Nora and the Siren Song will be released in April. That’s the third novel in the series. You can snag Werewolf Wedding and Duke of Autumn right now through Amazon. (Yes, I do little Kindle sales throughout the year so those of you readers who are on a tight budget, don’t fret. Follow my Facebook/X/Threads/Instagram and you’ll see when they’re on sale.)
As we speak, I am working on the 4th and final book in the Nora Grayson series, which brings me to the point of this Blog Entry.
Ending a series is far more difficult than beginning one. Or even continuing one.
All of those BIG questions that I have left hanging in the air for Nora need to come to a satisfying conclusion. And I need to do it in such a way that I don’t sacrifice the main theme of the series. AND all the characters on the page need to feel like they have come to a place of resolution somehow, not just Nora but the team/family she has managed to grow over the past three books.
So, what are some of the things I’ve learned during this process?
Tip #1 – Record your books
This is just for you. You don’t need to sell it. The sound quality doesn’t have to be amazing. You can do it on a shoddy little voice recorder you got for five bucks at a secondhand store, but record your books. The physical act of doing this will remind you what you’ve written, keeping the larger narrative alive in your head. AND, you can listen to the books while you do all the other necessary things of life like cooking dinner, washing dishes, or folding laundry.
Again, this is to keep the narrative alive in your head. It might feel funny at first. I know I felt weird, like it was a sort of vanity to listen to my own work, but at the end of the day it had practical applications. Characters I had forgotten about from the first book suddenly answered a major plot issue in the fourth.
Tip #2 – Story Bibles
Yes, I’ve mentioned these before. This is where you have written down characters and their rough descriptions in case they show back up because you don’t want a character to go from having green eyes to blue in the last few pages of the series. I use Scrivener for this, and I have pasted pictures to go along with said descriptions for these characters, because it’s fun and it makes me smile.
Tip #3 – Trust your instincts
If you aren’t satisfied with something on the page, then you can be certain that your readers won’t be either. I can tell you that I was stuck in November/December, so I went ahead and took a break. Something wasn’t working on the page, so I went back and reviewed and read the other books and poured over my plot notes. Granted, it took COVID forcing me into a hazy dream state for two weeks for me to really pinpoint what was wrong, but I’m confident I would have come to the right conclusion even without the illness.
The point is, my instincts were telling me it was off and I needed to listen to them. Sure, I kept shoving words on the page because no forward momentum = nothing ever gets done, but the struggle was important.
Which brings me to the fourth and final tip…
Tip #4 – Don’t be afraid to revise
Take this with a grain of salt. A lot of people can’t finish a book if they keep going back and revising. PLEASE USE THIS WITH CAUTION. If you know that you are one of those who will get hung up on making that first chapter perfect, then DON’T DO THIS. Just make a note of the changes you want to make on the next pass of the manuscript and move on.
For me, however, I literally cannot move on with the story if I know a major thing needs to change. In this case it WAS a major thing, it altered the course of the book in several ways, and I needed to make the words on the page match the story in my head before I could move on. I recognize the danger of constant revision for that first chapter, so please hear me when I say that I did this with my eyes open, I know that chapter is still not perfect, but now that it fits the rest of the narrative my internal Muse is happy and ready to continue the book.
That’s it. That’s what I’ve learned so far.
For those interested, we are sitting at 15k on the final novel, which isn’t where I wanted to be but I really did have COVID and was miserably tossing and turning in bed for nearly two weeks. Don’t worry, though. I’ll meet the deadline.
Happy Writing!
