Thinking about subplots...

...I guess this isn't really anything about story arcs or character building, just random stuff I've been thinking about while I do the sixty mile commute. It's a long drive, and I could do it in the dark with my eyes closed.

I've been over on Scott Eagen's blog--not his agent-ing one, but his regular blog where he's been thinking about category versus single title. Not in the normal way, where people explain how to use category as a springboard, but how to "be" category and what makes it different. I think it's his soapbox, because I recognize the amount of thought that went into his theories. After sleeping on it, I understand what he's driving at. Probably from the other direction, lol. But I get the picture.

Like Brockmann, and not to keep bringing her up--but she's almost a textbook example of the IM author moving to single title. Her IM books used the same plots and characters she later cannibalized in her Troubleshooter series. I see a lot of Jake Robinson from The Admiral's Bride in Max Bhagat.

In her first single titles, she did a historical subplot to flesh out her word count, and. eh--it was alright, but I always skipped that part anyway, so I was actually reading the "IM" section, what Scott called the "condensed" story. Then she started experimenting with continuing character arcs that spanned multiple books while keeping the standard h/h arcs and HEA in the current book. And her books took off.

It's easy to track her progress from Bodyguard, standard IM plot with padding, to Unsung Hero, standard IM plot but a little edgier and historical subplot, to Over the Edge, her first full on four character arc book, which is actually two IM plots--one in real-time and one as a continuity.

Scott pointed out a series book is condensed, without fillers or subplots, but isn't necessarily thinner. It's simply layered within the general theme of that particular line, which makes Brockmann's double IM plot structure--one of which is long and drawn out--almost elegant in it's simplicity.

...er, I've been reading other reviews on Hot Contract.

Not that I don't like to think I'm spiffy fabulous--some people love me and some don't--but the common theme in those who don't is my extra people. I love the real-time and continuing character structure. I love reading it, I love writing it. But...I think it works better in a bigger book. After edits and stuff, mine dropped some scenes and word count.

I think...to keep my people I need more plot, or less people. I can't stay in this limbo-land between 100k and category length.

Then again--I've also been wondering if it's simply a perception issue? Do people automatically see what they expect they're buying and get disappointed or happy depending on how that meets their needs? Say--if I were a mass-market single title--would people have wondered what the secondaries were doing in my plot, or would they have taken it in stride? I dunno.