Don't write yourself into a corner

For Delphi in Space, I really wanted to avoid painting myself into a corner, so I decided to write the first three books before I published anything.  Also, I’ve read that readers tend to postpone starting a series without at least three books in it.

The mistake I made in the Stone series was giving the main character too much power.  If your character is a superman, it’s hard to come up with tension and crises that are believable.  I teeter on the edge of that in Delphi in Space.  I’ve had to go back and modify the first three books numerous times to balance out the plots I wanted for future books.  Winging it on how many people were in the crew, and things like that, came back to be an issue when I was working on the fifth book.  I had to go back and fix up all those numbers.

I’ve worked hard to keep the science reasonably believable, but sometimes it’s easy to blow it.  A math error can really make the writer look foolish.  I kept trying to figure out why my acceleration of the fighters kept coming back with nearly the same numbers as I adjusted it up/down.  X= 1/2AT² really does mean that time is squared, so it’s the most important element.  Acceleration is just a multiplier, so having the ability to constantly accelerate really overwhelms the acceleration.  But it does take lots of reaction mass.

I have a spreadsheet with all of my assumptions on it, at least the ones I think to write down.  It really helps when I hit an “oops.”  I can backtrack and figure out what else that affects.