Okay, so, I am sounding the TAMMY PIERCE BATCALL or something. I am soon to finish Protector of the Small in the next month or so, and then there are a million more books to read. Which is great! However, it’s been brought to my attention that many of the upcoming Tortall/Circle of Magic books do not have traditional chapters. How will I split these books up? How will commissions work?
I figured that y’all were the best resource for this, so I am requesting your help! I would like to build a master schedule for the remaining Tortall/Emelan books that come after Lady Knight. Essentially, I want to know what order I’ll be reading the rest of Tamora Pierce’s books. On top of that, for non-chapter books, I would love it if the fandom could come up with a coherent way of splitting up the books so that they are digestible for me and so that we can have a master post for folks who’d like to commission them.
Here are some qualifications that I hope will help you:
- In general, a single commission covers no more than 25 pages in a book, so keep this in mind when splitting up chapters. Giving me a 45 page chapter is a bit much. (Some of the John Dies at the End commissions were unearthly large. One took seven videos, I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING. Let’s not do that again.)
- Please do not maliciously cliffhanger me. What I mean by this: There are natural breaks in every book. A cliffhanger is fine. Do not pick a break that’s like… in the middle of a paragraph. I KNOW YOU WILL WANT TO. Don’t make it artificially painful! I am positive I will break regardless, but try to make the cuts/break make sense.
- You should use page numbers to denote where these breaks will happen! Obviously, sometimes I’ll need to stop in the middle of a page. In this case, you are welcome to denote that I am to stop at the sentence ending with, “…. example example example.”
Ideally, what I will do is create a new post once we’ve figured this out, and it will list the entire order with all the splits for non-chapter posts. That way, I can direct folks who wish to commission things to the post and they can choose the part they want! When I make this post, instead of using chapter titles, we can call them each “Part 1,” “Part 2,” etc. and so on. Then the schedule will say which part is going up when, and commissioners can say, “I’d like Part 4 of X book.”
Given how complicated this might be, YOU ARE ALLOWED TO POST SPOILERS IN THE COMMENTS. I will largely ignore the comments, so everyone else who is a newbie like I am: THE COMMENTS ARE LITTERED WITH SPOILERS. THERE IS NO ROT13.
If y’all find that you need some clarification or need to ask me a question, send a chosen delegate to Twitter and ask me! (Only one of y’all, not 40 at once, LOL). I’m @MarkDoesStuff on twitter.
I HOPE THIS MAKES SENSE. And I’m so excited to read all these books with y’all. This has been so pleasant and satisfying, so I’m glad that the Tamora Pierce fandom gets the distinction of being the first fandom to convince me to read an author’s entire bibliography. Thank you!
