What It’s Like to Write a Book Series
Right now I’m at the start of the eighth book of my series I’ve been writing off and on since the sixth grade. It’s a zombie apocalypse style series where the zombies are the result of a rage virus akin to 28 Days Later if those zombies were actually dead. I have plans of making the series end after the 18th entry, but I’ve already slightly started a spin-off series that I plan on going at least five or six books with, and I’m open to other spin-offs as well. It’s called “The Lone World,” a name I came up with before I even had the idea to write a whole zombie series in the first place.
My process is very cyclical. There are times where I don’t so much as think about the series and have gone multiple years sometimes not writing anything, not even ideas into my notes app on my phone. Then there are other times where it’s the primary thing on my mind and all I want to do is put pencil to paper and think of how the current storyline will go. Right now is one of those times. I might be a bit busy most of the time with school, but I’m still thinking about and plotting a lot of the stuff that’s going to happen in the current book and beyond. It was actually only very recently that I decided how long this series was going to last, and what the main storylines of the remaining books will roughly be about. I’ve basically plotted the entire rest of the eighth book, I just need the time to be able to get it all in there. Once all 18 books are finished eventually, my plan is to rewrite each one because right now most of what’s been written was written by middle school me, so it’s not particularly good. They’re also all written in Dollarama composition books (hence the image for this post), where I can fit two 84-page length books into each one. I’ll need these books to be better and longer before publication is even an option, but I look forward to getting to this point in the process more than anything (except maybe the Winnipeg Jets winning the Stanley Cup).
For me, how I come up with ideas and decide how they go and what characters are involved is done by me just thinking about all potential ways I want it to go until the mix of all of it together I like best forms in my brain. I’ll think about something a few times until it’s turned into an idea with depth behind it and it makes sense for the current story. As recently as a month or so ago, I hadn’t really thought much of The Lone World or many ideas for the upcoming few books. In my notes on my phone I had some rough outlines for things that would happen in books 8-10, but not many specific details beyond some stuff at the very beginning of book 8 and a couple main things for 9 and 10. Now I have basically the entire rest of book 8 planned out with specific details, a good amount of things with more depth for book 9, and a bunch of stuff for book 10 and beyond. I had a couple very rough ideas for what would happen beyond book 10, but they were first draft ideas that I hadn’t put any real depth into. Now I know the main villain and story line for books 11, 12, and the first portion of 13. I also now know the outlined idea for how the series will end in book 18, and it’s way different than my barebones idea for how to end the series I had previously.
My current goal is to finish book 8 before summer is officially in swing, and be working on book 10 by the time 2026 comes to a close. I think that if I keep my current level of interest in The Lone World or at least something close to it for a good extended amount of time here, I can be only a couple years away from the mainline series being finished and ready for me to go back to the start and begin my rewriting phase. Hopefully I also have a good portion of the main spin-off books written and the remainder of them planned out by this time as well. I have no true goal for how I want this series to go when I reach the publication process, all I care about is getting there and no matter how successful it is after that I’ll be ecstatic if what would basically amount to my life’s work at that point gets read by even one person.
Hopefully by the next post on here I’ll be further into book 8 and can provide some nice updates on how it’s going and what the immediate future outlook is.