My New Fiction – Prequels, Stories, and Sequels (Together)
A speculative non-rant celebration of the way fiction can now be written.
Pictured Left : “Love Before the Fourth of July,” a Texas Short.
My Author Pages for major outlets.
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“the intent of this blog is to incrementally build a body of thought that works toward integrating various topics, yoga, fitness, and the arts – it’s a process…”
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Love Before the Fourth of July
Prequels, Stories, and Sequels
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A speculative non-rant celebration of the way fiction can now be written.
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Categories : Fiction – Author Bio Info & Updates
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Preview :
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Prequels, Stories, and Sequels
A few days ago I published a new short story, “Love Before the Fourth of July.”
Nothing too unusual about that.
One or more of the characters in the story are involved are in one or more of my fiction work, long or short.
I even have a collection of short stories already out, “Texas Shorts Vol 1.’”
So what so new then?
Simple, the time setting –
This short story is set after my current work, short stories or novels, with the same characters.
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Blasphemy or Just Plain Story Telling?
The immediate problems, understandably, are:
1) Why have a story out of sequence to the events to be portrayed?
2) How disruptive, or minimally, non-conducive to a good reading experience, is that?
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# 1 is fairly easy to answer, though it took me a couple of years of asking the question to get an answer –
or one that satisfied me enough for me to go ahead and, not only write a story with my favored characters in the future (by a year or so), but understand why it was ok – for me at least.
The largest compelling motivation I have for writing fiction is, I enjoy it terribly. Like the way I do painting, and shooting pictures, and dancing. Nope, not singing – I love it, but no, you don’t wanna hear it 🙂
And I wanted to tell this story, but…
I knew events I’m already working in on one nearly finished novel, “Slumming in Paris, Part Two,” and my outlines for both Part Three and the next series, “Lounging in Austin,” took one character out of the time frame this story is set in.
So either I could hold this story, or do as I see on many TV shows and movies, where people may know what the layout of characters are in the future, but not how they got there.
A good current example of a TV show, one both my wife Sheila and I enjoy, though she a little more than me 🙂 is, “Golden Boy.”
The stories of each episode do not suffer from knowing the main character is speaking from the future, much has happened to him and his buddies, we know some of what’s happened to them, but we don’t know how.
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This leads into # 2.
Does this out of sequence sequel spoil or ruin any or all of the storyline thread?
Personally, I don’t think.
But I acknowledge, some people may just plain not enjoy reading something in the fiction thread that far ahead. I understand.
A WordPress blog I came across, in preparing for this post, “A Movie Obsession,” has an interesting discussion about the value, or lack of, in sequels and prequels. One particular point was, “As a rule, when someone reads a book or any written story, they do not tend to reread the exact story over again and that’s another reason why I dislike many sequels.”
I tend to agree with that also, when it’s the same “story over again.”
Important, I believe, is that the story stand on its own, regardless if there’s hints of what’s to come, or has passed in the story line. And, that the story line be it’s own unique happening.
Then again, that’s the challenge anyway, even when there’s a whole ‘nother cast of characters, in a whole different location.
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One thing that helps, it seems, is having a time chronology for the story titles, so if a reader wants to follow the timeline as faithfully as possible, they can.
Joe Konrath has written about this in his posts and discussed it several times in the comments section. I typed in “story chronology” in his blog search box and it came back with four instances.
An example on his site is on a post called “Joe Answers Your Questions.”
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Wanna Try It, Free?
So if you’ve made it this far down 🙂 and you’re reading this by Friday, June 28th, you can go straight to Amazon and download a copy of this short fun little story, “Love Before the Fourth of July.”
If you missed it, it’s only 99¢.
And you don’t even have to be a Texan to enjoy it. 🙂
For those reading this in real time this week, download a copy, write a review if you’d like, and most of all, have a great safe 4th of July holiday 😉
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namaste´- con dios – god be with you
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*** INTEGRATING YOGA FITNESS AND THE ARTS
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