So, here I stand (or, more usually, sit) with the second volume of Descent just about ready to go, and the fourth volume of the same series closing rapidly in on the end of draft one. Just on 200,000 words in print, around 260,000 words in draft form, and another 250,000 odd yet to be written. Seven hundred thousand words in total to be inflicted on my readers across six volumes and, in the cruelest twist, across nearly six years. I know why I’m doing it, and I hope I know why my readers will put up with it, but there’s part of me thinks I’m nothing more than a sadist.

The whole process reminds me of a very nasty boyhood joke played out in primary school, a joke so convoluted and dragged out that it ran for months – and had the marvelous punch-line of “I can’t tell you, you’re not a monk”. It got me into my first, serious, no-holds-barred fight, one I’m in no mood to repeat now. So how to hold a reader’s interest over six years?

Part of it is good story-telling, engaging characters, and a solid, well-paced plot. But here’s the thing. All of those rely on readers staying through the whole series, and most readers want something to be going on with in the meantime. Small payoffs if you like, an advance on the final reveal and, more and more, something that will stick in their minds, annoying little factlets that will have them salivating for the next installment.

So I’m leaving breadcrumb trails through the first five books, trails that develop and reveal throughout the series in ways that readers mightn’t expect, through characters who’ve faded gently a book or two ago. Strings running through people, events, phrases, even words that will pull volume one right up into volume four in a reader’s mind and have them pining for the ultimate payoff in volume six. It’s reward for effort to the reader in my mind, reward outside the ultimate reward of answering “what the heck is Descent all about?” but more along the lines of snacks or tid-bits (or, as some of my harsher beta-readers have told me, closer to dog-biscuits used as a reward for toilet training. Yes, a harsh bunch I admit, but I do sort of love them).

But this places an immense amount of pressure and work on my shoulders. Plotting and writing turns from being a small, linear process accompanied by happy feelings and followed by intense, continual writing sessions, to a circular navel-gazing exercise in medieval mind-torture that has me gazing out the window for hours, brain-locked in multiple, parallel strands of plot possibilities that need to be sorted, game-played, and then somehow integrated into a coherent whole across 700,000 words. The actual process of writing, while on the one hand becoming far more rewarding, evolves into the author equivalent of water-boarding as I try to stumble through how to integrate it all without showing too much but letting enough get through to keep the reader engaged. Sitting for five hours and managing 1,500 words down is not how I imagined it would be, but that’s how it is. As if that’s not bad enough, final edits with my publisher become exercises in cold-war spy intelligence interpretation as what appears to them to be vague, passing lines in the text balloon out to critical, die-on-a-hill passages for me. Happy days? Maybe not.

So, to the point. To get a payoff for readers across and inside the series, someone has to put up the readies, and that’s me. And you. To make your reader’s engagement with your work as pleasant and as enjoyable as possible, you have to suffer, and suffer more the longer your work gets.