Why Do You ALWAYS Write the Prequel Second?

By Brenna Lyons

This is a question I hear often, and it seemed like a good time to address it.

I think it’s safe to say that I don’t always write the prequel second, though it sometimes seems like I do. That said, there are two important factors here.

The first is that the only reason the word prequel exists is because people write the ‘story before the story’ often. If everyone wrote a world in order, there would be no need for the word prequel. Everyone would write their worlds in chronological order, and additional books would always be serials to or sequels to the ones that came before.

But writers don’t write so neatly. I certainly don’t.

To understand why the prequel comes after another book so often, you have to understand my writing process. I meet a character or group of characters, and they tell me a story. In the case of CLOSE ENOUGH TO HUMAN, I met Aleeks Daahn and Miri Johns, and they laid out the story of CETH for me.

Somewhere in the back of my head, other books in the world are in various stages of completeness and competing for my attention. They compete so vehemently for my attention that sometimes other books hit the active writing process and then the printed page of an earlier book without me noting they’ve done so. An example would be Aleeks comparing sating the quickening with Miri to the same occurrence between his younger sister Zondra and her human mate, Evan Duncan.

Mind you, I suspected then that Zondra and Evan would eventually have a story of their own, but a check of the active memory banks later... No, it wasn’t available for the conscious mind to tap into yet. So, I kept writing CLOSE ENOUGH TO HUMAN and resigned myself to the fact that Zondra and Evan would tell me their story when they were ready to.

Before the end of CETH, I realized that I had a forward-moving series that would include books about children of the Daahn nest and possibly even grandchildren of the same. But I realized I also had a backward-moving series that would include Zondra’s book and even a book for Daahn the Elder and his mate...and a sideways moving series that would include books about other Xxanian families. The threads woven into CETH led in all directions, and the picture would grow around the first book, necessitating prequel books.

In their own ways, characters in earlier books hint to me that certain events -- past, present, and future -- will be important in a larger world view. If I’d waited to publish CLOSE ENOUGH TO HUMAN until I’d written and published the prequels in chronological order, I might or might not have made it into the all the other books from the Xxan War world I have in progress now; the impetus of edits on one book in a series sometimes jogs the mind into high gear on other books in the same series.

In this case, I’d already started writing Zondra and Evan’s story (MATING SEASON) before I hit edits on CLOSE ENOUGH TO HUMAN, but in editing MATING SEASON, the muse kicked me in the head and pointed the way to two more Xxan War works that are screaming at me and hitting the active writing process with a vengeance. Those two are SUBDOMINANT and CROSSBRED SON. Both of them direct the readers to other Xxanian nests that are closely allied to Daahn’s nest and set concurrent to or closely after CLOSE ENOUGH TO HUMAN.

In some cases, I don’t even realize the weaving is set in place for a new story. In the case of CROSSBRED SON, it grew out of a subconscious game of what-if that started with an unanswerable question posed in MATING SEASON. I didn’t even realize I intended to answer that question, let alone in detail, at the time the question appeared in MATING SEASON.

But my brain is something of a pattern matching algorithm in motion. It hates an unanswered question, so the question percolated in the subconscious. Two characters stepped forward, tentatively raised hands, and said: “We know the answer to that one. Do you want to know?” Whether I want to or not (and I’m curious, so I usually do want to know), the muse wants to know, and she and her whip will not rest until the answer is in print and smiling up at me.

Available now from LooseId! MATING SEASON, the second book (but a prequel) in the Xxan War series.

Or cut your teeth on the first installment, CLOSE ENOUGH TO HUMAN!