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A strong background story can make a series go on forever
by Leandi Cameron
It is true that it isn’t easy to find a unique angle in today’s already overflowing paranormal romance/fantasy market to say the least.
However, writers must understand that by creating a strong backbone for your story can take your book’s series in more direction than you ever could have imagined.
Novelists should understand the importance of creating a three-dimensional plotline for a novel – giving it a bit of meat.
When we start to sketch out our plotline and dig into writing our novel, it is easy for writers to sometimes forget that secondary characters cannot be cardboard cutouts – they have histories, and stories that should be told as well. This is what makes a story flow, and they are critical as they also have motivations and goals. You wonder why, though?
The reason being, that a subplot creates the backbone for any storyline and are important to ensuring the flow of the main plotline.
Therefore, it is important, once you create your plotline, to not forget your background plotline and subplots, which integrates into the central plotline. Always remember, they are not separate entities, but run hand-in-hand to form a complete body.
My novel, A Tale of the Other Kind: A Therian Novel was born not from just a static modern-day paranormal romance or fantasy – this book is filled with a series of histories created from various mythologies from South Africa to more known myths from the Greeks and Norse mythological deities.
However, to find a place for this novel in the market to be exceptional and unique, I decided to change the myths to suit the book’s needs and to make it desirable for today’s youth.
Most of it, especially the myths from the Khoi San rings true, but to be able to create a new specie of shapeshifters that suited the progress of the book’s narrative, I created a new storyline from where shapeshifters originated from – and that is from mythological gods and their love for humans, of course.
However, what makes this book different, is that what we know in modern-day paranormal books as vampires, werecats, werewolves, fairies, goblins and more, in A Tale of the Other Kind: A Therian Novel, they are all one in the same – they are all shapeshifters. These shapeshifters are doomed to roam the earth as immortal, because of the jealousy between gods and the fight for the love of a human that is now trapped in an enchanted copse – who is also the mother of all shapeshifters.
Even though this is not the crux of the first story in the series, it is the background it and of all the stories to follow, and it creates a completely new reasoning that all things paranormal are, indeed, shapeshifters.
Within the novel, each character has its own background story and, therefore, the series can continue for many books still – not necessarily only with the romance between Kai and Sienna – or even a love triangle with feisty vampire Astrid.
Who knows, once Kai and Sienna’s tale has been told, I might enter the world of telling Astrid’s story, or the love triangle between Quinn, Zai and Sulay.
However, this series can even tell stories of fairies, vampires, werewolves and many more. It is so exciting to know that once you find your background, and find one that actually gives you many options, how easy it is to build upon it.
Leandi Cameron is an award-winning journalist and newspaper editor. She is also co-owner of multi-disciplinary company and publishing house, House of LeaVik, and the author of A Tale of the Other Kind: A Therian Novel, which is the first in a series. For more information, visit www.leandicameron.com.
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Genre – YA Paranormal Fantasy
Rating – PG13
More details about the author & the book
Connect with Leandi Cameron on Facebook & Twitter
Blog http://www.lrcameron.blogspot.com/
Website http://www.leandicameron.com/
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