I took another step back and now I’m examining the series premise for my novel. It was always in the back of my head that I didn’t have a clear plan for the series or what the overall arc would be. I thought I would figure it out as I went along, but that probably isn’t a great idea.
In the first book, I had my hero fleeing to the protection of a mysterious order to escape a death sentence for killing the king . . . but then what? I had a vague idea that in the end, she would take the throne for herself, but no idea how I would get there and how that final conflict would go, which, in retrospect, seems ridiculously foolish to be missing.
The problem I am facing now is that while very little of the writing advice out there is for writing genre fiction, rather than literary, even less of it is about writing genre fiction series.
Perhaps it is time to do some research on amazon, at least examining the sales copy of each book in popular series to see if I can deconstruct how they go about their overall premise and individual books.