Why so Series-ish: a guest blog by Lauren Willig

The winner of the signed copy of MALICE AT THE PALACE is Karen in Ohio!

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: August must be the month for fabulous historical fiction! Our own Rhys Bowen with her ninth Her Royal Spyness mystery, MALICE AT THE PALACE, and the writealicious Lauren Willig with the last (sob) of her Pink Carnation Series, THE LURE OF THE MOONFLOWER were both released yesterday! If you're one of the few readers who hasn't discovered Lauren's hard-to-pin-down series (Humorous Romantic Napoleonic-era-romp Spy Thrillers/Academic Mysteries) you must leave your computer, hie to your local independent bookstore, and purchase them immediately.


Okay, done? You're back? Good. Because not only has Lauren made the HRN-e-rST/AM genre her own, she's also been writing beautiful stand-alone historical fiction weaving mystery and romance with intriguing settings like colonial Kenya, the Pre-Raphaelite movement and, in THE OTHER DAUGHTER, the Bright Young Things of 1920's England.

Did I mention THE LURE OF THE MOONFLOWER and THE OTHER DAUGHTER came out only two weeks apart? And that Lauren has a toddler at home? And that she wrote her first book, THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE PINK CARNATION, while she was in Harvard Law School?

Just typing that made me tired. We Reds may consider giving up writing our books and just let Lauren handle everything for us.

Hi, Jungle Reds! Thanks so much for having me back here. Whenever I visit, I feel like I’m sinking into a cracked leather sofa in a good friend’s den. It’s a place to kick back with a drink in your hand, a shoe dangling off your toe, and a long, deep breath.

I could use a long, deep breath right now. I’ve had two book releases in two weeks: on July 21, The Other Daughter, a 1920s stand alone novel (my attempt to see what would happen if I tried to channel Mary Stewart and Evelyn Waugh, add a lot of caffeine, and stir), and now, yesterday, The Lure of the Moonflower, the twelfth and final book in my Pink Carnation series.

Can you tip that bottle of wine over my glass again? Thanks.

The adjective that seems to constantly attach itself to the Pink series is long-running. (Although, really, when it comes to long-running, I’ve got nothing on Deb! I raise my glass to you, sweetie.) I’m deeply bemused by this. I wrote the first Pink Carnation book, way back in 2001, as a way to avoid writing my dissertation. It was a lark, an inside joke, a swashbuckler gone Blackadder with spies swinging through windows, Napoleon being soundly put in his place (by a chaperone with a purple parasol), the odd heaving bosom, and a few comic sheep. But a publisher saw it as something more than a private amusement and signed me up to write another one. And then another one. And a few more.

So here we are. With the Pink series in my rearview mirror—so to speak—I’m thinking about series, the care and feeding thereof. Close-ended series, open-ended series, ongoing protagonist series, barely tied together series, and those series that are really just one book told in multiple installments.

My Pink Carnation series was a series by accident. Which means that, instead of sitting down and thinking all of this out in advance, it simply accrued. The books each featured a separate Napoleonic adventure and separate protagonists, tied together in three places: by the spy master (spy mistress?) known as the Pink Carnation; by the characters all being part of the same very interwoven world; and by my modern framing character, an American grad student named Eloise, who popped by from time to time to announce that she’d found a new cache of documents, spill coffee on herself, and stumble into a few mysteries of her own. It was a not-a-series that turned into an open-ended series, each book largely carrying its own weight, which, around book six or so had developed enough of a larger story arc that it needed to be shepherded into a close-ended series, so I wouldn’t leave readers hanging like that blasted 1990s remake of Dark Shadows that ended in the middle of an extended flashback. (I’m still miffed about that.)

To be honest, I’m pretty glad that it all happened by accident, because there was no way, back in 2001, that I could have planned half of that. I’m a big believer in the chaos theory of writing: that the stories you stumble into in that dark closet of your mind, tripping over spare characters, and sending odd bits of plot crashing around and banging you in the back of the head, are much more interesting than the ones you keep carefully dusted on your shelf, ready for use.

But now that my Pink series is done, I’m in the position of having to figure out what to do next. Theoretically, writing a series ought to have taught me Deep Writing Lessons that can be applied to my next venture, whatever that might be. The problem is… I’m not sure what those are.

(Other than: anyone who tells you that you can write while the baby naps has a much more napping baby than I do. But that’s another topic.)

I’ve been punting the question by writing stand alone novels, each of which is its own unique structural challenge—and rather makes me miss the comfort of sinking into the familiar world of a series. Of course, while I was writing my series, I complained I didn’t have enough time to experiment with new plots, characters, and time periods, so this is definitely a case of beware of what you wish for. The manuscript is always inkier?

So what do you think? Do you prefer open-ended series or close-ended series? Do you think series ought to be planned in advance or develop as they go along? If you were to restart your writing career from scratch tomorrow and could write anything you liked, what would you choose?

You can find out more about Lauren Willig at her website, where you can also see the whole list of  the Pink Carnation series in order, and read excerpts of  The Lure of the Moonflower and The Other Daughter. You can friend Lauren on Facebook, follow her on Twitter as @LaurenWillig, and read lots of extra tidbits and book discussions on her blog, cleverly disguised as the News on her website.