Putting Kari Wang first

Linesman, Alliance and Confluence are Ean Lambert’s story. Yet we didn’t start book two, Alliance, with Ean’s point-of-view. We started it with the secondary point-of-view character, Selma Kari Wang.

We were worried how readers would react. In some ways it felt as if we were breaking a promise. We’d promised Ean’s story. Instead, they open the book and find Kari Wang. Only for the first chapter, mind, but how many pages does it take for a reader to decide they don’t want to read the book?

Half a page.

So why did we do it?

Chronologically, Kari Wang came first.

We had three ways to write the story. We could have written the scene as a flashback. But doing that took away a lot of the impact of the scene. It made Kari Wang distant, and less sympathetic.

We could have written it as a prologue. They’re not that common in sci-fi, but we do have them.

Hands up if you’re a reader who skips prologues. Sherylyn is. But there are other reasons we wouldn’t make it a prologue. To us, a prologue should be about something that happened a long time prior to the story starting. Timewise, the incident that opens the book happened at the end of Linesman. Add to that, the person it happened to is a point-of-view character.

The only other option was to write the story chronologically, which is what we ended up doing.

We think it works best, even if the poor reader does have to stop and wonder if they’ve opened the right story.

In other news

Current status: Exhausted

It’s been a busy week.

Alliance was released on Tuesday. So far, it’s been well-received, with some positive comments from people who’ve read it.

We’ve had a couple of guest posts. We’re linking to those as they come in.

There have also been lots of giveaways, both of Alliance and of Linesman. So many, in fact, that the our blog and twitter feeds are filled with ‘giveaway’ posts. There are two open at the moment. SF Signal for Linesman, and The Qwillery for both Linesman and Alliance.