Creating a world for a series

Sometimes when finishing a rough draft or even final edit of a book, there is a mix of satisfaction along with sadness. It's leaving behind these people you've gotten to know really well. A series changes that.

 Image purchased from CanStock to become one of the hero's paintings

Often my series have evolved as I don't know there will be more books. I just come to see over a period of months that hey I'd like to follow up another character and see where it goes. 

The Hemstreet Witches weren't like that. I planned this from the beginning to have five shorter books (under 60,000 but over 50,000 words) involving one family with five separate romances. 

This will be the main room in Gallery 11, where the hero had an art show. 

I bought the image of a gallery from CanStock and then created the show as I imagined it to look like.

The image will be in the trailer for Book 1 with the heroine in front of it. 

As soon as I finished the first rough draft for The Enchantress' Secret, I was beginning to think of the next book. My original plan for which sister would find her challenge and love didn't feel right; so I readjusted the order and began writing the key points needed for Book 2.

Other authors probably have different approaches to this but basically I take the original character-plot sheet, and remove all the characters or elements that I won't need in the second book. I save it with a different name; so the original one remains. I also list the animals that will be involved which means horses, cats, dogs, birds, etc.


With Book 2, I now have a list of secondary characters, which can grow as the story does. There are basic character notes for the heroine, hero and whichever sisters or other heroes will show up now as secondary characters. The work was most extensive for the new hero as I already knew quite a lot about the second oldest sister.  

Since I found the titles and created the covers already, that also helps me stay on track for the series and each book. I won't be able to do more than the opening chapter before I get back to the editing for the first book. Series writing is definitely different than anything else I do-- at least, when I know it's going to be a series.