Saturday I finished the plot summary for the second novella in the Pendragon Casefiles season 1, which is tentatively titled Deep Waters.  My goal for April is to get the plot summaries done for the remaining 5 novellas in the first season for the casefiles, so that I can write them and release them every other month, starting with Into Thin Air in May at Balticon.

“But Val,” you say.  “You don’t  need to have the entire first season planned out before you start releasing them, you know.  Just have an idea of where you want to go.  Or, even better, let the story just FLOW!”

And then you start running, because I pull out my rapier with a snarl…Oh wait, sorry, wrong blog post.

Seriously, though, I have written a series without knowing what the heck the next book was going to be.  And for someone who is a plotter, not a pantser, I can tell you that it was horribly painful.  It’s not that Horseman wasn’t a good series – I think it was, but had I planned everything out before I released the first book, I think it would have been easier to write the other two.  So for this series, and for all the series I have planned going forward, I plan on having at least the plot summaries done before I release anything, for several reasons.

1. I know what’s going to happen in the series.  This is HUGE for me.  Some writers like waiting to see what the characters will do for them – I don’t.  It makes me very, very nervous.

2. It allows me to see the characters’ personal arcs and gives me ideas for how to continue them.  As a lot of my writing is very character-based, this is very important as well, and doing the plot summaries shows me how they interact with each other as well.  Half of my plot summaries are dialogue anyways.

3. It also needs to be noted that my plot summaries are guidelines.  This is not to say that things don’t change (because trust me, they do).  But having the guideposts there let me see where I’m heading to.

4. Lastly, writing the plot summaries helps me to worldbuild without getting bogged down in just worldbuilding, which I am prone to.  If I don’t have a storyline to wrap my imagination around, my worlds get very involved and convoluted, and I just keep going “Oh, that would COOL!”  without thinking about how practical said cool thing would be.  This is a bad thing, trust me.

So these are my thoughts on writing a series.  Remember, I’m a plotter, so YMMV.  But if I had to do Horseman all over again, I would totally have planned it all out before the first book hit the stores.  Which is why, with Pendragon, I’m doing it right.  Well, my version of right.

What about you?  Do you write series?  How do you do it?