Claire and a request

I had gotten a lot of requests to continue my Claire story, and when I decided to go back and reread some of my works, it came as a surprise to me that I had not marked it as finished! I guess things had come up in life, and I forgot about it. Nevertheless, I've finally finished it.

As I got back into the story, I realized something about myself. I never thought of myself as much of a writer, but after the comments and scores that I've received, I feel that I am at least acceptable. However, I am clearly deficient in the technical aspects of writing, particularly series. When I write a story, as I usually do, from start to finish, it doesn't impact me as much, because I tend to write with only a vague idea of what is going to happen, and I let the ideas flow linearly.

When I went back to finish Claire, however, I really had problems. First of all, there are a lot of characters in this story line, and I have to keep them straight. The Tired universe is now over 500 pages of material, and I sometimes forget who is who, and what they've done.

So here's the request. I know that people who write novels, and especially multi-book universes, tend to keep 'bibles'. If you do this, I'd love to hear from you on how you do this. What kind of information do you keep? Bios, descriptions, chapter summaries, for sure. Anything else? Do you use any particular software to do it, or do you just do it as a document?

Also, a number of you have asked if there is anything that you could do to help me. What I really need is someone (or some ones) to help me come up with this bible for Tired and Favor. Someone who could summarize chapters, write biographies and descriptions of the characters, based on what I've already written. If you're willing to help out, let me know! It will help me write even better follow-ups, without ruining the continuity.

As I got ready to follow up on Claire, I had to reread all of Tired and Claire. One reason is that I have an awful memory. This is good and bad. Bad for obvious reasons, but good because I can reread my work (or others) and it seems somewhat fresh. In fact, as I read it, I thought, 'Hey, that's not bad. It's almost as if someone wrote down all of my fantasies!' Then I realized, 'Oh yeah! That would be me!' It was fun rereading my work. I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I did!

As usual, I would love to hear about what you thought. And of course, as usual, I need to thank Peter Z for making sure that when you read my work, you are not distracted by annoying errors. I just recently read a great story, but one that was peppered with typos and grammatical errors, and it made me realize once again what a huge difference it makes when those things don't detract from the story. Peter makes sure that they don't.

I hope you had fun reading my story, and let me know what you think!

MWTB