Toby Neal’s Lei Crime series

Writing a long series is hard work: how do you churn out book after book while keeping it all fresh and avoiding repetition?

Author Toby Neal had some interesting thoughts on the subject, which she shared in her post, Writing more than ten books in a series and staying fresh. You can read my highlights below.

9 Tips to Keeping Your Series Fresh

• Write an archetypal main character, and preferably secondary characters too. Doing this will hook readers and generate lots of great mine-able material.

• Develop a big, strong, overarching character development arc. Toby had that, and it took the first five books to achieve. After that, she did another, smaller arc. And then another. All of them still fit under the original, main umbrella.

• Just writing plots and recycling the characters will not end up satisfying you. Torture the main characters with some…