Continuous Chapter Numbers
I found one: The Matter Destructor. I just downloaded books three and four. I’ve read book three, but I don’t remember any details, so I wanted to re-read it before reading book four. The book opened on Chapter 62. It’s nice that Amazon remembers my place – especially when it doesn’t tell me on the website that I’ve already read something. After choosing “Go to beginning”, it was still at Chapter 62. Sure enough, the back button put me on the title page.
I’m still not sure how I feel about the idea. I don’t need to decide until I decide if I’m going to write book two, which is hardly an immediate concern since I haven’t written chapter five of book one, yet. I also need to decide if I’m going to do spin-offs. I can see the mainline story continuously incrementing (hopefully monotonically) while starting over with chapter one on the side-story novellas.
As long as I’m posting something, more notes on point-of-view.
The Ajax’s Ascension series switches between first and third and head-hops in the first. The first person chapters have a heading stating who’s point-of-view the chapter is written from. It works OK, but seems to scream “you chose the wrong POV!” to me. If we need the perspective of other people, tell the story in third person. A lot of it is cheatily telling the reader what other people are plotting whilst our intrepid hero is off doing his thing. It does work, it just seems unnecessarily awkward.
The Voltsmith series, such as it is (only one book, now), is worse. The main character is first person. Everyone else (only one person, so far) is third. If the side-kicks get their own chapters, keep it in first and just head-hop. I gave up on this one four chapters in. Yay, Kindle Unlimited! The main reason is the first person main character. He’s always thinking to himself in quotes. While that does actually happen, it doesn’t happen in full, grammatically correct paragraphs. The internal monologue was too much, even by chapter four.
Even though I’m writing tight third person, the main reason my intrepid heroes are a couple is so that they can talk to each other rather than monologue to themselves.
By the way, even though I’m starting to pay attention to this sort of thing, it’s not destroying my reading experience. Although, The Laird probably wishes I wouldn’t talk about it with him.
Marked Up 