Brandon Sanderson's lectures have also been interesting, because he does balance advice between standalone/series. And of course, writing is subjective, so there's definitely no right/wrong way of doing things. I guess, I'll just have to chance and learn as I self-publish. Thank you for your points!

Writing (& publishing) multiple series as trial & error takes a long time, so am just surprised how little series-specific advice there is. The motivation part hasn't been the issue, it's the analysis I'm interested in & how to balance endings vs remaining mystery. Beta readers have helped at least.

Definitely, couldn't agree more. The best guidance I've ever had has been to write & rewrite. Learned most of what's already out there as advice by myself, just doing that. My wip has been rewritten 4 times. But I don't believe that helps you learn how to handle readers expectation over 3+ books.

Thank for the feedback, makes sense. But I find it difficult to find advice on writing series, I guess because of the prevalence of standalone books.

There's quite a bit of a different approach between the two. So, even if you achieve a standalone book, I don't think it helps then writing a series.

Thanks! I don't use Discord, I do have an Instagram account (p.j.loop), but I find that system pretty buggy, or at least —it doesn't seem to like me very much. Feel free to share stuff over there if it's easier, or DM here, if that works.

That works fine as a title, reminds me of that ol' chestnut:

This title isn't working.

Here's a strange kind of mood-board I put together a while back as part of a demo of bits & pieces. Gives a feel for me doodling new ideas, which eventually build up to better pieces. But I'm slooow and rough. So, it takes a while to get to the more refined pics. Btw. I'd Love to see your stuff too.

Nice! Always found my own style gets in the way when sketching/drawing, so I'd be useless at doing on-demand work (works ok for my stuff at least). Although, to be fair, I wasn't bad at logo design for clients, but that's nowhere near as interesting as concept art. It's a beautiful but tricky field.

Brilliant!

Nothing better than focusing on something creative, I find. Especially sketching, painting, drawing... although it does take serious amounts of quiet time.

Do you have a particular style/voice to your work? Or do you like to try for a range or be experimental?

Heh, ah, well there is already a hint in the first msg in this thread. But it will only make sense once EP3 has been read.

All I can say is I've had fun with the senses in this book series... Apologies, I know that isn't very 'teasable'.

How about yourself, do you write? read? clearly you do game.

Thanks for the question! Writing (for me) is such an up & down process, but at the moment I'm feeling amazing. That's happened each time a new part of the story clicks. It kind of fuels the focus & energy needed for the next 100,000 words.

It's frustrating too however, as I can't show anyone yet. 😅

If you are planning a major update to your software, could you perhaps go for a more human readable storage system? Or allow plugins to be made that can do different things to aid in a writers journey?

This might be blasphemous to some, but it would definitely stop me trying to reinvent the wheel.

But yes, I realise Scrivener is going for old-school.

It is old-school (if you can call computer software such).

And many users would (rightly) get horrified if it suddenly became internet enabled with cloud syncing and all the rest. 😬

And yes I am probably a very small minority.

But... but...

This will be where some bright spark turns around and points out there's some hidden feature in Scrivener that let's you run arbitrary code against your work. As I keep discovering features like this —for example the random name generator??

Used Scrivener for years without spotting that.

My later attempts are more nuanced and work directly of the RTF files (once I managed to reverse engineer the manuscript structure to the library storage). But that is fraught with danger due to how brittle RTF is.

Using scripts definitely helps line edit 300,000+ words, however.

I have now tried about eight different ways to do this, to help me find repeat bugs (syntax issues, etc.) and auto replace them (with the power of coding—not RegExp).

The first attempts involved working on an export and reimporting until I realised all the formatting gets lost to various degrees. 😮

I guess coming from the web world I'm used to formats that are human readable and easy to edit.

But trying to make batch processes that I can run against my manuscript (without having to export and then reimport) is made all the harder due to the RTF format, and Scrivener's internal library system.