My latest excerpt is from the opening chapter of A New Past Book Three. I chose this opening to get the reader right into the action. I’m not a fan of extensive re-caps of what’s gone before in a series, so chose to assume readers were already familiar with the main character, Paul, who is thrown into the conflict in these first few paragraphs.
The scene is a mid-flight emergency on one of the orbiters Paul has built. It is the first flight Paul has crewed as the flight engineer. By putting him straight into the thick of it, readers can get a sense for both his prior accomplishments as well as his continued hard work to train for a job on the orbiter’s flight deck.
While I assume the reader has followed along with the prior two books, this opening had plenty of clues on what has gone before that a reader new to the series could read the book without picking up the first two books. Given this abrupt opening, there are some obvious questions you might have. I’ll try to anticipate and answer them here:
- How much time has passed since the end of Book Two? Approximately two years. Book two ends in June of 1993 and the incident opening book three takes place in March of 1995. Each book contains a complete timeline of real and imagined events covered in the book for the truly curious.
- Why does it open with “Pan-Pan” rather than “Mayday”? According to wikipedia, PAN-PAN is the international standard urgency signal that someone aboard a boat, ship, aircraft, or other vehicle uses to declare that they need help and that the situation is urgent, but for the time being, does not pose an immediate danger to anyone’s life or to the vessel itself. Mayday is used to signal a life-threatening emergency. At the opening of this event, the crew does not believe they are in immediate danger, but they can’t talk to anyone.
- What is the cause of the emergency? You’ll have to read the book to learn the answer to this one. During the scene, characters believe there was some sort of debris strike effecting communications with the ground. Once they land, they learn more about what caused their problems.
- What else happens in Book Three? [No spoilers here]. Book three is the climax to the series. It catapults Paul to the center of geopolitical conflict and forces him to face his own mortality, his own morality, and loss he cannot overcome with his knowledge of a future world. It brings the saga to a conclusion while leaving the door open for more stories if the muse ever strikes me to revisit the world.
- Will there be a Book Four? No. Paul’s tale is concluded in my mind. While there are possible stories in the universe that has been created, I don’t want to continue following along in Paul’s wake.
- Why not? As a reader, I dislike stories that never end. I don’t want to be an author that makes my readers wait for “yet one more extension” of a tale. Book three concludes the story I set out to tell. It creates what I think is a unique “do-over” tale that avoids tropes of getting rich by knowing what the financial market does. It also explores the impact a person with advance knowledge may have even in the modern world. Many writers in the genre send their protagonist in the distant past in the vein of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”, but few tackle such a story in the near past. That is the challenge I took on, and I think I did it well, so I’ve chosen to stop here.
Tell me what you think….
Please like the Marketing Monday posts if you find these behind-the-scenes discussions useful. It there are questions that come to mind from the excerpts or these follow-up posts, leave a comment and let me know. I’m also open to any questions on GoodReads, if you prefer that platform.
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