Series or Standalone

The question came up about how I decide when a book will be a standalone or part of a series. If you asked five different authors this question, you'd probably get five very different answers. The first seven manuscripts I wrote made up two series. I didn't decide this ahead of time. When I finished the first book, I knew the complete story had not been told, because I still had other characters, situations, and scenes rolling around in my mind. I write until the characters quit speaking to me with additional information and the new scenes stop playing in my mind. Each book in one of my series will still have a definite ending and not require the reader to purchase more to get a complete story. I want them to buy others in the series because they enjoyed the first one so much, not because I left them hanging. In my opinion, a book's ending should never have a cliffhanger.

The Appalachian Roots series contains four books. I had thought there might be a fifth book about the Moretz twins, but they never brought me their stories beyond the first skeleton bit of information, and I had no scenes that kept coming to me. You see, my characters drive my stories, and I write what comes to me and won't go away. I've also been asked where I get my ideas. I don't know, because they seem to find me. But all this makes writing as exciting for me as reading is.

After those first two series (one is a contemporary trilogy that has yet to be published), I wrote three standalones. I self-published When Winter Is Past, set in colonial Pennsylvania, while I waited for Uprooted by War to get through the publishing process with my publisher. The second one, Through the Wilderness, set on the Oregon Trail, may be the next one I publish. The third one is a contemporary that I want to polish some more before I seek to publish it.

Wyoming

In the meantime, I've been working on a five-book series set in early New Mexico, and I have three of the rough drafts finished. However, a new standalone set in Wyoming in 1875, In from the Storm, has become so clear that I'm going to write it before I go back to finish the last two books in the New Mexico series. I like to have the complete series finished before I start to release the books. Then I can make any changes without being locked into what has already been published. I can't wait to see if In from the Storm might become part of a series on double rescues or not. There's also a series on betrayals that is not quite clear enough to write yet. But the writing life remains exciting as I get to time travel all over the place.

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