So my 10/10/10 goal has some and passed. Needless to say, it didn't work out. Events out of my control happened. Then I had fun with some odd illnesses. School. Life. Procrastination. Just tons of things happened to prevent me from actually doing the synopsis and looking at agents. Then there was a death in the family. I also have a job now. Third shift.
But failing to do look at agents and do the synopsis only ended up as a learning experience, which is how I view failure anyway. I don't think I've ever seen it as a bad thing. More like a mirror, but moving on.
Since I had to sit on my precious baby, I went through and found some glaring errors. Weird stuff like sentences I was clearly trying to edit and somehow got distracted, so the sentence was half written and entire sections made no sense. I went through the book, making sure it all made sense. Just when I thought I was good, I met an author doing a book signing last weekend and saw that, while he had a series, each book stood alone. When I asked how he managed to pull that off, he said to refer to past events very briefly. My brain ran with that. So here's what I came up with for my series:
-Tie up as many loose ends as you can
-Protagonist's story-worthy problem should be resolved
-The surface problem (plot, as I understand it) should be resolved
-Each character should show growth and change if they're important enough
-Referring to past books can be like an inside joke and every loves being included in those
-New story-worthy problems and surface problems in each book
-No more than two protagonists (I tend to want everyone to be a protagonist)
-The series plot is always looming.
So that's what's working for me at the moment. Not sure if it's a correct way of going about making each book in a series stand alone, but it seems to be a logical course of action from what I've observed in the other series...es...s...how do you make 'series' plural? Or would it be serials? Moving on...that's what I've seen in the others I've read.
Related to other series and protagonists, I beginning to see that Fantasy and Sci-fi are allowed more...rope...to play with so-called established rules. Instead of one protagonist, George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series has...quite a few. More than I can count at the moment. I know there are at least ten in each book. What he does it goes to the characters who are moving the plot forward. Each character has their own chapter and they all relate to whatever major plot point going on where that character happens to be. Or if they're in the same place, the shift involves an event that only that character can describe. Each book stands alone...or will when he finishes the series. Patiently waiting. :)
Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman do the same in the Dragonlance Chronicles and Legends. Instead of a new chapter, they jump in and out of heads easily. And it's not hard (at least not for me) to sense the change. They did eventually split the party into bite-sized pieces, but overall, the whole was reached. Each book stands alone.
Kate Elliot does a combination of Martin and Weis and Hickman. She jumps in and out of heads, but not to the degree that W+H do it and instead of chapters devoted only to a character, she'll use a line break when she switches. Again, each book stands alone.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have Erin Kellison and J.K. Rowling. They generally stick with their protagonists. Every once in awhile, you see events from a different point of view. I think Stephen King's Dark Tower series falls here too, but I haven't finished that series yet and I need to get Kellison's second book now that I'm thinking about it. In all three cases mentioned above, the books stand alone.
So that's what I'm currently going from. I read on websites and in writing books and hear in classes all the time to read in your genre. Granted I'm pretty picky on what I read.
Looking all of these, I have to think I'm doing something right in revising one last time. I hope. Yes, I realize this is still a form of procrastination, but at least it's more likely to help the book get published. Rather than say...changing a character's name, which I did yesterday incidentally.
Some of the terms I used above, 'story-worthy problem, surface problem' come from a teacher of mine, Les Edgerton.
The incoherence comes from working third shift.
