Sunday - On SeriesAffinities by Janet Lane Walters #MFRWauthor

 I'll soon be talking about designing series using a friend Karen Wiesner's book Writing the Fiction Series. So I thought on Sundays for a time, I would talk about some of my series. I never realized I'd done so many of them. The first series I'll talk about is Affinities. There are four books in the series and they're all available via download or in paper books.

When I started the series, it was to be one book. I have this strange way of planning a book. What I do is a throwback to the days when I was read to children's stories and when I read stories to my own children. There is little dialogue involved and occasionally setting is put into play. What happens is I have the characters and I let them tell me what happens next. Affinities was to be a story for my grandchildren. At that point I had four. One was born in an Air sign, one in a Water sign, One in an Earth sigh and one in a Fire sign. The characters developed had some of their traits and talents but also those of the four cardinal signs in Astrology.

When I finished this story written in pieces while I worked on other stories. I had nearly 70 pages of story. Now this was much too much for a single book so I divided the material into four and set out to begin the books. I had finished the first I called it a chapter but it was more like a segment and sent it to my good friend and motivator Jane Toombs. She loved the bit I showed her. So once begun I had to finish the series. But I'm also someone who can't sit down and write the same kind of story over and over again so there were periods of time between the books of the series. The last book didn't emerge until I found a new publisher for the first three. For some reason with the first publisher they didn't sell. They are doing much better now. This is an EPIC fantasy story.

On future Sundays I will be showing bits about the characters, the many focus characters, the villains and some of the strange things that popped into the story as the books progressed.