Wow, I am tremendously excited for you Jilli! I think it's a fantastic idea for a book, too.

Yay Jilli! Congratulations!

Eeeeee, Jilli that's so great! I'm so happy!

Is this the big news you've been hinting at for months?

So much yay, Jill! Gothic Charm School for the win!

Go, Jilli! I can't wait to see your stuff in print! Are you going to have Pete design the dust cover?

Yay!

Congratulations, jilli!!

Congratulations, Jilli!

Question for the writing hivemind:

The manuscript I'm working is meant to be first in a series, so one of the new-to-me issues I'm dealing with is striking the right balance between making each volume reasonably self-contained and still having an overarching plot and theme for the series as a whole.

The first volume is all about a little group of people coming together and deciding to fight back after a severe military setback. In the second volume, the group gets a little larger and better organized, but it's the same basic idea--they're scrappy resistance fighters trying to harass a much larger enemy force until help gets there. And they're confident that help is on the way, because there's a whole large army out there that's on their side. It's just that the army in question is at such a distance (and in a relatively low-tech world with no mechanized transport or immediate communication) that it may be a year or so before they get there.

Anyway, the army tries to come to the rescue, only to be utterly annihilated in an ambush--very few survivors, most of them imprisoned under harsh conditions or sold into slavery, etc. One officer escapes and sets out on an odyssey to get back to Our Heroes and let them know what happened.

So, I have two dilemmas: When should the reader find out about the massacre of the army, and when should the characters find out?

My initial thought for the first question was to have it be the prologue of Book Two. But now I'm wondering if it'd be better as the epilogue of Book One, since I'm only a third of the way into the story and already my characters are reassuring each other that all they have to do is hang on till the cavalry (and infantry and artillery) arrive. So I'm afraid my readers will think I've set up an easy solution, and therefore I need to let them know that there is no cavalry sooner rather than later. OTOH, kind of a downer to directly follow up Our Heroes' unlikely triumph in the battle at the end of Book One with the Gory Depressing Massacre Scene of Hopelessness. Thoughts?

On the question of when my characters find out they're on their own, I know it's going to be toward the end of Book Two. I just can't decide if it's before or after that book's Climactic Unlikely Battlefield Triumph. Before would give me a really bleak black moment before Our Heroes decide to keep fighting anyway, but after would have some dramatic potential, too, because Our Heroes could then end the book wondering if they're fighting for a hopeless cause and so on. Thoughts on that one?