{"id":234,"date":"2008-05-11T16:53:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-11T16:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/?p=234"},"modified":"2008-05-11T16:53:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-11T16:53:00","slug":"a-nice-problem-to-have","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/11\/a-nice-problem-to-have\/","title":{"rendered":"A Nice Problem To Have"},"content":{"rendered":"

So my friends are reading Frost Moon<\/span> and giving me feedback, which I’m letting pile up while I get other work done (and so my committment to what I just wrote can evaporate to the point I can read it objectively). But I’ve already started the sequel, Blood Rock<\/span>.\u00a0 I wrote a lot of Frost Moon<\/span> in the Barnes and Noble Writing Group at Steven’s Creek, but I’ve avoided reading Blood Rock<\/span> there because I thought it might be a spoiler for my alpha readers who were still reading Frost Moon<\/span>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Now I know holding the new chapters back was a good idea.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My mother-in-law just finished Frost Moon<\/span> and said "I can’t wait for more!". So I sent her the first chapter of Blood Rock<\/span>, which she immediately printed out intending to read it.\u00a0 But Sandi’s dad got to it first.\u00a0 He’s read part of Frost Moon<\/span>, but had stopped and was waiting for his wife to record it on tape so he can listen to it on his long over-the-road trips. But he sees Blood Rock<\/span> lying around, picks it up, and BAM! page one, gets a huge spoiler for the ending of Frost Moon<\/span>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There are obvious spoilers in the first chapter of Blood Rock<\/span>: the central character of the series is still alive, as are other people whose fate was in doubt.\u00a0 I was worried that people would find that out, but in all truth you could guess that from the fact that it’s a book in a ‘genre’ series<\/em> and not a ‘literary’ one-shot novel.\u00a0 It’s going to be a story about someone’s continuing adventures, not about the unfortunate events leading up to someone’s untimely death.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But there are also NON-obvious spoilers: who the main villain was, what he was doing, and what happened to him.\u00a0 I won’t go into any more details, but suffice it to say these are MUCHO<\/em> spoilers if you haven’t finished the first book.\u00a0 I hadn’t been worried about that, but in hindsight this is blindingly obvious.\u00a0 So I am very glad I didn’t read this at the writing group!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As my mother-in-law and father-in-law both pointed out, it’s rare for a book in a series to give away the ending of another book in the series.\u00a0 And so I need to be careful about how I refer to the past.\u00a0 While I can’t hide the end of Frost Moon<\/span> – it’s integral to the plot of Blood Rock<\/span> – I can instead hold these revelations back to the last possible minute.\u00a0 And now that I think of doing that, it seems like it will make the point when I refer to it even more of a shock.\u00a0 Nice.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I’ve never had this problem before.\u00a0 It’s a nice problem to have… \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

-Anthony<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So my friends are reading Frost Moon and giving me feedback, which I’m letting pile up while I get other work done (and so my committment to what I just…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4],"class_list":["post-234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dragon-writers","ratio-2-1","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}