It’s about two days to the release of the seventh and final part of The Knife of Narcissus on Monday, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the readers and reviewers who have been following the saga feel about the whole thing—both about the resolution for our heroes, and about the experience of reading the story in installments. Boy Meets Boy Reviews has some thoughts already.
One thing a reader might wonder about here at the end of Lucius and Trio’s tale is: why send a story out into the world as a serial, if the entire thing will be available eventually in one volume? I go back to my thoughts about serials in the guest post on Sinfully Sexy Book Reviews way back in August when this all began:
Some tales can be limericks. Some can be the epic of Gilgamesh. Ebooks also make it easy to send installments to readers—no more hanging around on the docks waiting to grab the latest chapter of David Copperfield. Which is great for the way I write. When I saw other romance writers using the serial format, it was as if someone had unlocked a door and said it’s all right to step through too.
At a workshop an awfully long time ago, the main critique for the story I brought was that, instead of following a traditional three-act structure, readers counted four, five, six, seven acts…and the story wasn’t even finished. It wanted to be nine acts. Maybe eleven. It wasn’t sure. I stuck it in a trunk and shut the lid so I wouldn’t have to hear it complain anymore. It took years of struggling against my instincts to realise that what I was writing were episodes in a story of many parts that didn’t easily fit the classic structure….
In all, it’s been an interesting experience to publish a serial, and I’ll have much more to say about it after I’ve had a chance to absorb and reflect. The novel I’m working on now won’t, I suspect, be published in parts. It’s more compact, a more tidy narrative. It is, however, also set in ancient Rome, because I cannot get enough of the place. And there’s more to tell about Lucius’s world.
Did I say above that this the end of Lucius and Trio’s story? I misspoke.
Alas, there will be no gladiators.
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