The set-up

I'm writing the last two chapters of Panthera : Death Song this week.  The ending has to do two things. It has to round off the story satisfactorily for the reader, and ideally it has to leave them wanting to read more of my work.

These days we're told that agents and editors like us to write a series of books with the same characters.  The logic is that it's easier to market a writer when readers have already fallen in love with a  set of characters.  

But there is a middle course.  In the Panthera books, Eyemind, and its second book Points of Death, I'm writing standalone adventures, but featuring the same main characters.

If you study many recently-published novels, especially young adult ones, you'll see that they often include the first chapter of the second book in the back of the first one.  I did that myself at the end of Death Spiral.  That's fine when you know what the story of the next book is going to be, but when you haven't yet plotted the next book your set-up has to be more general.

I do know that the third Panthera book will be called Panthera : Death Plain, that it will be set on Earth, and that a large part of the story will be about what happens to Panthera back on Earth.

And really that's all I need for my set-up.  I can send them off to their next destination and provide a hint of the challenges they're going to face.  After all, the function of a set-up is to tantalise about the next story, not to tell it.