It’s interesting reading some of the reviews for the first series of Thrown Away and some of the things I’ve taken away from it were expected, others not. Quite a few people commented on the rather soft ending and I do have a reason behind that. I got to near the end and I already had ideas for where the next series (and possibly the third) would go and I found myself having ideas and reasons to keep most of the characters alive.
Sure, I could have gone for a sacrificial lamb of one of the main characters but looking to the next series I found too many questions of “how am I going to do this if they are dead?”.
Then it occurred to me. Why is it necessary for there to always be a character death? No one wrote a rule on that. Yes, I could go all George R. R. Martin on you all and wipe out half the cast, but I don’t have as many characters as he does.
Can I promise the same in the future series? No, absolutely not. The world IS dangerous and as anyone who has read the first part (the only released part so far) of series 2 will know – they are heading into even more dangerous territory.
Another thing that people noted was the strange format. Episodes/Parts and then scenes instead of chapters. I wrote the original first part as a standalone novella with no intention of going any further. When I took up the pen to carry on after so many people wanted more it seemed that the right thing to do was to carry on the same format. So, you got more novellas.
But how big are the stories? The first series is just short of 120,000 words, so probably quite average in the Fantasy genre, but at least half again the length of most mystery, thriller or a lot of Scifi novels.
I’m going to keep going the same way because I really enjoy working on novella length chunks rather than huge novels, it kinda feels like TV episodes (which I’m hoping someone will someday want to do!) and that’s a format I find enjoyable. It does make it a bit odd when it comes to pricing, so I’ve had to go with the lowest price I can for each episode. I think I probably loose money in the long run doing that, but I so far you’ve all been buying the box sets and reading on kindle unlimited in large enough numbers that it still pays the bills and lets me carry on doing what I love, so I’ll stick with that.
Lastly the series seems to end abruptly for some people. I guess I was trying to mimic the way TV series work with that too! There will be another series, though, and yes I like cliff-hangers so I’m not planning on stopping using them.
I’ll have a look at some more reviews another time and see if I can answer a few more questions.
Love to you all in trying times.
Glynn James