I’ve realized that although I love series, I also have a difficult relationship with them.

On the one hand, if I fall in love with a world and the characters, I’m a bit disappointed to find that there isn’t more. I want to return to that world and spend more time with those people.

On the other hand, there are a lot of ways that a series can go wrong for me. For one thing, I have a bad habit of burning out when I binge a series. If I find a book I love and there’s another one, I grab it right away and plow through it, then grab the next one, and I often give up about halfway through that one. There are a number of series on my shelves with a bookmark midway through book 3. I don’t know how much that’s me or how much it’s about the books. Often, book 3 is where things go darker and more intense, where the characters begin to really change, so the books start to feel different from what I fell in love with in book one. That’s also often where the party gets split, with the story going off in two different directions, and frequently it focuses on the characters I don’t like so much while barely touching upon the characters I like most. Sometimes their story gets picked up in the following book, but if I don’t get through book 3, I’m not likely to get to book 4. Still, I have found that I’m more likely to finish a series if I read something else between books, so some of it may just be my issue.

Then there’s what often happens to the story in the series. Book one is usually fairly standalone, even if it does leave things open for a sequel or even sets up the sequel, since that’s the book the author sells to the publisher. That book needs to have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Book 2 may even be that way, since the author has usually written it before book one gets published (I’d written Once Upon Stilettos before Enchanted, Inc. was released). But once they know it’s going to be able to be a series, things can get wacky. That’s where story structure sometimes flies right out the window. A whole book may be setup for the epic conclusion in the following book or may be a side quest or diversion to delay the ultimate confrontation.

I had two frustrating series experiences this week. In one, I suspect the series was meant to be a trilogy, and when book 3 came in really long, the series was successful enough that the publisher decided to split it into two books. I was chugging along in book 3, and things were just about to kick into high gear, at the part the hero’s journey calls “approach to the inmost cave,” when the book just stopped. I may have actually shouted, “What?” This morning, I got book 4 from the library, so now I get to see what happens.

With the other series, I kind of feel like the plot is just an excuse for the characters to hang out together. There’s this supposedly dire situation that they have to deal with before the evil wizard takes over the world, but two books into the series and they haven’t done much of anything about it because they keep getting sidetracked. They go to a place to get or do something, but then they spend page after page just hanging out and talking to each other. I’m okay with a story that’s mostly about the relationships among characters, but it doesn’t work if there’s that constant threat of the world being destroyed in the background, and they’re the only ones who can save the day, but they’re more concerned about their feelings for each other.

I have mixed feelings about the “world” kind of series, where there’s a different protagonist in each book. If I find out that there’s a different protagonist from the one I fell in love with in book one, I’ll be reluctant to read book 2, only to fall in love with the new person when I do read it. The same thing happens when there are sub-series within a big series, so there may be the same protagonist for several books, but there are mini-series set in the same world that focus on other characters, either in a different time or in a different place or sphere of life (like, say, the Guards books and the Wizards books in Discworld — they’re set in the same city but focus on different things, and then there are other Discworld books taking place in a different part of the world). There have been times I put off reading a book that didn’t focus on the characters I liked, only to finally read that book and love the new characters even more, so then I’m less thrilled about going back to the original characters.

I’ve mostly written the kind of series in which each book is more or less a self-contained story that fits together in a big-picture story, with the same main characters in each book. Now I’m exploring some other ideas and trying to figure out whether I as a reader would want to keep reading, would I burn out, would I get sidetracked, or would I fall in love with each new group of people.

But first, I need to know what happens next in that series I’ve been reading.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had books with almost no romance in them rejected by fantasy publishers as being too “romancey.” I’m reading a book right now that gives me an understanding of what they might have meant, though I still don’t think it applies to my writing.

It’s a fantasy book by an author who’s written historical and time travel romance. I can’t tell if it’s published by the fantasy imprint or the romance imprint at that publisher (it’s a publisher that does both, and there’s no indication of which side of the house it comes from, just the generic umbrella publisher name). Structurally, it’s more of a fantasy. The romantic hero and heroine don’t meet until about a third through the book. There’s a main plot that has nothing to do with the relationship. You could remove the relationship without really affecting the main plot. There’s no sex and not even a kiss, though the hero and heroine are in love (he admits it, but she’s still half in denial while still having obvious feelings). That would put it firmly on the fantasy side of the fence. I wouldn’t think you could publish it as romance (unless the fact that the author is a romance bestseller is a factor). Someone reading it for the romance would be very disappointed.

And yet it all feels very romancey. This fantasy plot is written like it’s a historical romance. The voice is straight out of romance, as well as the internal thoughts of the characters regarding each other. He spends a lot of time thinking about how beautiful she is. Once the hero and heroine meet, the main plot takes a backseat to their developing relationship. While you could remove the relationship without affecting the main plot, it would be a really thin and weak story if you did so because there wouldn’t be much happening. At times, it almost feels like the author forgot about the main plot, and she did seem to forget about the other characters. It’s one of those “couple in a group on a quest falls in love along the way” stories, and the rest of the group gets so forgotten that when one of them is mentioned later, I had to flip back to remember who that character was. He’d been present in the group all along, but he hadn’t been mentioned for a couple hundred pages. The quest is supposedly quite urgent, but reasons for the whole thing to pause while the hero and heroine go off and do something alone for a few days or for the rest of the group to go off and leave them alone for a day or so keep coming up.

I mostly like the characters (though I sometimes want to throttle the heroine). The hero isn’t the typical romance hero, which is a plus. He’s a character type I adore. But I kind of want to rewrite the book. It’s so close to that model of what I love and have been looking for, but in spite of being written like a romance, it’s missing the spark that I get when that trope is done well. It’s somehow less romantic than it likely would have been if it had been written more like a fantasy. There’s zero subtext. It’s all right there — she’s the most beautiful woman ever, so he loves her even though he sometimes finds her infuriating. And, no, I’m not going to name a book I’m criticizing like this.

So maybe that’s what the editors mean about my writing when they say it’s too romancey even though there’s little actual romance in the book and the two characters don’t even kiss. I wouldn’t have thought my voice comes across as “romancey.” I have to keep reminding myself to give character descriptions and to put the emotions in, but I do sometimes let a character fixate on some aspect of their crush object and mention it a lot. I’ll have to keep this in mind going forward. Not that a romancey voice is a bad thing (that’s where the publishing money is), but it’s bad if it keeps getting me rejected from where I’d like to have my books be, while my books aren’t anything that could actually be published as romance because they’re so lacking in romance.

Sometimes the reasons we read, or don’t read, books can be a little strange. I’ve bought books because the cover was illustrated by someone who illustrated the covers of other books I liked. They were entirely different kinds of books, but I guess I thought that the art linked them, somehow. It wasn’t a rational choice, though it ended up working for me in some cases.

I’m currently reading a series that I didn’t read previously because the author’s name was too similar to the name of an author I liked. Weird, huh?

When I was in high school and college, I was obsessed with the Deryni books by Katherine Kurtz. This was before the Internet, so there weren’t a lot of ways to know if an author was going to have a new book coming out, other than maybe some of the specialty magazines (that I didn’t know about at the time). You mostly found that there was a new book by checking the bookstore every time you went to see if there was anything new. I discovered Kurtz (or I guess I could call her Katherine, since I actually know her now) when she had a bit of a lull between books, so I’d binged everything available up to that point, then had to wait for the next new one. Every time I went to the little bookstore in the mall, I’d check the K shelf of the fantasy section, and I’d get excited when I saw something by another author with a similar name — Katharine Kerr. Even the name of the series was similar enough to fool you if you saw it out of the corner of your eye, Deverry. I’d run by the bookstore (they had small bookstores in most malls back then) whenever I was in a mall, and it was just similar enough to jump out at me as my glance skimmed over the shelf. I’d get that “new book!” thrill, then take a good look and realize it was something different. Then I’d be so mad at that (poor, innocent) book that I wouldn’t even look at it because it had disappointed me by getting my hopes up and then not being what I wanted.

Then not too long ago, I saw something mentioning that series and thought I ought to give it a try. It turns out that it was the sort of thing I would have liked, so I was missing out by blaming those books for not being what I hoped they would be. They even have some similarities to the Deryni books in that the world is loosely based on medieval Wales. This series draws upon Celtic mythology, imagining a world in which some souls are doomed to make repeated returns to life until they resolve a particular issue, and in each go-round, those people tend to find each other and replay the same sort of conflicts. In the “present” of the story, we have the latest incarnations, but woven throughout is the story about how they got into that mess to begin with. Tying the threads together is an ancient magical man whose error in the past set a lot of things into motion, and now he’s stuck staying alive until he can fix it and free the others from the loop. He’s found the appropriate souls in their new lives, and they’re caught up in a conflict stirred up by others with an agenda, which complicates matters. He can’t really fix his own issue until he finds a way to defeat the bad guys so that the people he’s looking out for don’t get killed before they get set on the right path.

Our main character in the “present” is the daughter of a mercenary soldier who’s grown up traveling with her father and who is now the equal of most swordsmen. I was afraid we’d have a case of “not like other girls” with her being good at typically male things and that making her better than most women, but the cast of characters is pretty well balanced with other women who are good at politics and diplomacy or herbs and healing. When we had the inevitable “strong female character is terrible at sewing” scene, it’s not treated as that somehow making her better. The story points out that the noblewomen are responsible for providing clothing to the people who work for them, so this is necessary work, and she’s not good at it because she’s had no practice. That’s refreshing to read, especially since these books were published in the 80s.

The first book is Daggerspell, and I just finished the second book, Darkspell. There is some unsavory content that’s a bit questionable in places, but I felt like it was handled with some sensitivity and wasn’t dwelt upon for titillation. Let’s just say that some of the same things that are in A Game of Thrones are in these (though published nearly a decade earlier) but they’re handled in a very different way with a lot less relish.

It seems that these books are considered Sword & Sorcery or Epic fantasy, but what I liked is that they’re really about the relationships among this group of people and how these relationships have affected history over the centuries. I like the back-and-forth nature of the storytelling, showing the past lives and how they affect the present. Each book seems to focus on a different go-round of the past while moving the present story forward. I guess it’s kind of like Lost or Once Upon a Time, with the flashbacks and the present-day stories.

I got these books from the library, so I have no idea if they’re still in print (they do seem to be available as e-books), and I don’t know how well the series will progress or end. But I have requested the next book in the series as soon as I’ve finished reading one, so I guess they’re keeping me interested. I don’t hear a lot about Kerr now, but she seems to have been publishing at least up to 2009, with 15 books set in this particular world, and it looks like she’s self-published some things more recently. She seems to be one of those woman fantasy writers who’s forgotten when people act like women didn’t get into fantasy until recently.

People who like epic fantasy like The Lord of the Rings but also want character-driven stories are most likely to enjoy these.

Thanks to a recommendation after I discussed The Beast’s Heart, I read Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge by Lisa Jensen, and I highly recommend it as a very different spin on the Beauty and the Beast tale.

This one is told from the perspective of a servant girl in the palace of the spoiled young nobleman. After he rapes her, she vows revenge, and the wise woman of the forest curses him to be the beast he is on the inside. The servant girl wants to watch his suffering and is transformed into a candlestick so she can stay in the palace (basically, Lumiere, but no dancing. She’s aware of what’s going on but can’t move other than to raise or lower her flames, but can communicate telepathically). But the Beast seems like an entirely different person than the nobleman, not even remembering his life as a human, and they strike up a friendship. And then a merchant shows up, looking for shelter, which changes everything.

This is definitely a book for those who like the Beast and are disappointed when he’s transformed at the end of the tale. There are a lot of twists, and although the story follows the plot of the fairy tale pretty closely, getting the story from a different perspective allows the author to throw in information that we don’t get in the tale. That allows it to take some unusual turns while still sticking with the story. You can imagine that this is what’s really going on in the fairy tale and we just don’t know because we don’t see these events.

This version is disturbing, romantic, and incredibly satisfying. It was published by a YA publisher, and my library had it in the YA section, but I don’t know that I’d consider it YA. It felt rather adult to me. The rape is fairly graphic (more emotionally than physically, but you know exactly what’s happening), so that might be triggering for some (it’s a couple of paragraphs, so easy to skip, but it resonates throughout the story in the impact on the character). It’s not really a coming of age story, even if the heroine is in her late teens. This seems like a weird publication choice. I think adults will enjoy it, and parents of younger teens might want to read it themselves before letting their kids read it, both to make sure it’s suitable for their child’s sensibilities and to be able to discuss it. The book mostly covers emotional healing and the question of what a “beast” really is.

Add this one to your list if you like exploring all the angles of the Beauty and the Beast tale, and it will make you look at the other versions in a different way from now on.