Let’s Catch Up With Profit and Loss
Sometimes when you’re writing a series, especially when you strive for each book being able to stand on it’s own, you run into the dilemma of needing to impart key information about a character or situation that will affect the action in later books. How to fit it in? Especially when it involves past experiences of a main but not viewpoint character. Or an event that involves the entire cast but is not sufficient to support a novel length treatment.
One way is with extensive flashbacks. Another is an involved subplot that doesn’t directly push the book forward but will become important in later books. Both are valid but carry risks. The former may involve head hopping in the flashback or may interrupt the flow of the rest of the book. The latter risks highjacking the focus of the book and diluting the immediacy of the action.
A third option is what I have chosen with Profit and Loss; a collection of short works that involve Zack and the crew but with no intent to be novel length. The entire collection of three shorter works is barely 50K words – a novella, a long 7000 word short story and a shorter work of barely 1500 words. Together they fill in some blanks in the overall story of the Profit and her crew and are helpful in understanding the third full-length novel in the series, Profit Motives.
In the novella, A Respectable Profit we learn that respectability isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Cleo is happy running a legitimate business, Rabbit is along for the ride, but Zack and Deuce are chafing a but under the yoke of customer service.But when the brother of Akira Kensai, Zack’s reluctant ally from Glowgems forProfit asks for his help, things get interesting and we learn some critical information about the difference between natural and cultured glowgems.
In From Ceres with Love, the POV shifts to Deuce and events during the Reunification War when Zack is in prison and Deuce is a wanted man. Deuce befriends and helps a lounge singer named Grace Tyler who is more than she appears to be. They fall in love and try to run away together. Deuce leaves her on an asteroid colony named Delilah when the War ends and he feels he must find Zack in the ruins of the Martian Republic. He promises to return for her, but things don’t work out the way he planned. The story give us a new take on Deuce’s character and sets up some key events in Profit Motives.
Finally, the very short story, Initial Profit, tells how Zack, Deuce and Rabbit ‘acquired’ the Profit and the funds to refit her as a freighter. It also sets Zack on the path of revenge that was one of the driving forces behind events in Glowgems.
As I said, I strive to make each book in the series a stand-alone, but Profit and Loss fills in some key details and is a fun and interesting read that provides some enrichment and insight into the crew and their characters. I recommend it to any fans of the series.
Profit and Loss is available now from Brick Cave Media. You can order direct, or from Amazon, Bookshop.org or any independent bookstore. It is available in paperback end eBook formats.
