On Building Something Large — And the Characters Who Won’t Wait

I spent today in the architecture of a future series. I say future because I have no business being here yet — I am deep in edits for the Dead Reckoners, and Sunny and Donovan and their people deserve my full attention, and they are getting it, mostly, except for the hours I apparently spent today doing this instead.

The new series has a name. The Shape of Family. Five duologies, running concurrently, built around a found family and the specific, different kinds of love that take root inside one.

Here is the structural decision that everything else hangs from: all five Book Ones end at the same moment. A chopper goes down in the field. Part of the unit is captured. Each of the five couples arrives at that ending from a completely different place — different stages of acknowledgement, different degrees of having named what they are to each other, different amounts of armour still in place. The crash doesn’t care about any of that. It happens to all of them simultaneously, and the reader who has followed all five will arrive at it five times and understand it differently every time.

Book Two in each duology deals with the aftermath. What captivity does to people. What thirty-six hours of not knowing does to the people waiting. What the recovery looks like when the relationship underneath it is at five different stages of becoming. Five registers. Five emotional architectures. One event that the whole universe passes through together.

After Marc and Finn and their people have told their stories fully — after the Compass Point universe has been given everything it deserves — Alex, Isaac and Adam are going to be ready to begin. They have been sitting in the back of my head for some time now, these new boys and girls, and they are not being quiet about it. They have things to tell me. They are, frankly, quite insistent.

I should not be writing this yet. I have said this to them. They are not listening, which is how I know they are real.

The Shape of Family. Five duologies. Ten books. A found family that builds itself from the ruins of the ones these people lost, and loves each other into something permanent and chosen and entirely their own.

I cannot wait.

— Avery