Despite the title, this is not a post about releasing certain books during certain seasons.
Because books don’t expire and can be experienced throughout the year, not to mention there are certain hemispheres on planet Earth where summers and winters occur at opposite times, I want to take writing certain genres and with certain feelings in the direction of comparing them to seasons rather than a release window according to a literal season.
For example, a spring story might be a story about hope or the gradual awakening of what it takes to come of age.
The flowers of your existence bloom, the works of your hands increase, and everything is staged in the latter cycle of the newness of life.
Spring is a perfect time for a resurrection story, much like the most famous story in history, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Notice He resurrected in the spring, and it wouldn’t have made any sense aesthetically to do so later in the year, at least according to my opinion. The biblical holidays also have a part to play in this, to be fair to the intent behind it, but I believe the point is well made.
Let’s quickly think about it, though.
A spring story is a story about life and newness breaking free of the constraints of the winter that preceded it.
A summer story, on the other hand, is a bright tale. It reflects increasing hours of light and the unfolding revelation of grander narratives, especially for books in a series. The illumination of greater truths will be those summer narratives across the wide gamut of your novels.
If you’re writing a long-running series, some of your books will be spring books. Others will be summer in genre and theme, and the darkest ones will be winter, with somewhere in between being the fall.
I believe there is a certain effect in releasing books according to seasons, but again, since a book can be read at any time of the year, it seems kind of superfluous to even think about it that way. As superfluous as adding that way to the end of the previous sentence, yet for my personal style, it stays.
Thinking of the book genres you write in as different seasons of the year, you’ve got at least four grand archetypes to categorize your novels.
Your spring stories will fill people with hope, while your winter stories might be existential horror or filled with Eldritch creatures that come from somewhere beyond comprehension and description.
Archetypes and framing are significant when it comes to writing stories.
You’ve got your hero’s journeys, your three-act structures, your four-act structures, and even a circle of a character coming back around to the beginning, changed and metamorphosed through ordeals.
No matter what structure you use, framing your stories in such a way is of the utmost importance. This will be a grand category of four types of stories I can tell is a useful thought for an author.
For example, I have a novel I’ve been working on called D65, which is a ridiculous concept when you think about it for more than a few minutes. A murderous TV calibrator will kill people for not adhering to the creator’s intent by breaking into their houses at night and observing them over many weeks and infiltrations.
Kind of like a really twisted version of an old Jim Carrey movie. You know which one I’m talking about. But far, far worse obsessions.
But would it make sense to classify that story as a cozy spring story?
Again, not the season, but the feel of the season.
Of course not.
It’s a dreadful tale of a murderer and an investigator exploring his methods, while the main character is a Hollywood screenwriter.
It doesn’t make any sense to categorize it as a spring story, even if the story is filled with hope in solving the mystery and putting a killer behind bars. There is also a hint of the supernatural there. But not too much.
There are brighter themes to the story because every story must have some sort of triumph. But to classify it as, let’s say, a bubblegum type of story doesn’t work.
Now, I have another story coming up called The Candle’s Edge: In Lunar Glass.
That story involves ancient secrets from World War II. And when I say ancient secrets of World War II, I don’t mean that World War II is ancient so much as the occultism going on during those times was such that people were seeking things lost to history on certain sides of the conflict.
It’s a grim story full of magical cats and traveling between locations on Earth using a candle and a mirror.
It’s quite a strange story, and it’s got a gothic atmosphere.
But does that mean it should only be considered a fall story?
No.
Because the themes of that book, while dark, are going to bring the newness of life and its resolution. So in some ways, it is a mixture of fall and spring. It is a mixture of those two conflicting and disparate points on our calendar.
My upcoming light novel, The Voided Promises of Noble Songs, would be considered a spring story because it is about Stanzielle Quintette’s coming of age, where she grows from being a teenager into the beginning stages of her dream of becoming a symphonist, which can only happen after turning seventeen repeats old.
And I’ve made sure she goes through hell in that story so that she comes out of the crucible with a refined new understanding and an appreciation for the party accompanying her.
That’s the thing about stories.
We have to put characters into dire situations because it is those situations that naturally progress the story. Depending on the grand archetype of the story, the situation might change based on what you set out to accomplish with the narrative. I want the feel of spring with the aesthetic of fall and winter, mixed with characters who act like summer.
You wouldn’t even have to plot anything out, though this story has been plotted out, taking place in the Treblesong Archipelago with a tyrant queen of an enemy nation as the principal driving force of the conflict.
But even though the story has a dark tone to it, I still consider it a spring story.
A prime example of one of my stories being a winter story, though, would have to be A Knight Stained Black.
That story is dystopian in a way where even the very construction of the story is supposed to be unnerving and uneasy because a totalitarian state erases the truth for its own version of the truth.
So in the same manner, the book is called a novel even if it’s a novella.
And I thought that would be a quirky thing to do. I wrote it as such to be cheeky, but the price point reflects it correctly.
It revolves around a dark game of chess and a man trying to save his wife in a grim future where the United States is ruled by chess, especially on America’s East Coast.
But in that story, there’s a supernatural being from Polish folklore who plays a game where you turn your spouse into a piece on her game board.
And I thought that would be a fun concept to explore.
Unfortunately, I had to cut that novel down to novella size because describing chess moves over and over, while it can be done, gets repetitive, and I didn’t think the action would spring to the reader’s mind interestingly if I kept going through different opponents.
There are only so many ways you can say this piece moved to this space.
That’s my opinion. Maybe someone else could do it better, but that’s where I stand on that.
Anyway, it’s a winter story. It’s a very dark and grim one.
And I wanted to explore Polish folklore a little and the crazy idea that America could be conquered by a chess grandmaster who forces everyone to play chess.
I thought that’d be interesting, but in any case, a winter story unfolded.
I have a summer story coming up, not literally releasing in the summer, but a story about a gloomy loner on the California coast who meets an elegant sea nymph and their blossoming relationship, even though he blames the sea nymph for his wife’s death.
An interesting dynamic to explore, to see the very person or creature that is the object of your hate come to fruition as something that can unfold beautifully.
It’s a summer story based on the trails of the winter as its premise.
The Ocean Sang Her Song (When I Found My Eyes) is an example of what I like to write, and while that book will be quite grounded in reality, I also love writing about fantastical things, even in normal, everyday occurrences.
That story is a summer story and literally takes place during the summer, but anyone can enjoy it, even if it’s December 2027.
A story is meant to be enjoyed at any time of the year, and even if the seasons can reflect the tension and mood of a story, especially when the weather outside matches what you’re reading, that’s not always going to be the case if someone picks up your book in April and you’ve set it in fall.
But we need to have that overarching superstructure to know which metaphorical season our book belongs in.
This is going to be a winter story.
This is going to be a summer story.
Not literally the season, but the themes that branch out from the seasons based on those four categories (I’m aware I listed two just now) will help you identify and pinpoint your genre.
I’m a person who likes to mix genres, and maybe you can’t always pin down which genre my book should belong in because one of them might be magical realism mixed with gothic horror, while another might be a romance novel mixed with a space opera.
We don’t always know.
Sometimes, we don’t know at the outset of the book, even if we haven’t planned out exactly how the story will turn out, but it’s usually going to fall into one of the four seasons on the spectrum.
As for real-life seasons, it’s currently fall in America, and that’s one of my favorite seasons of the year, followed by winter.
Fall and winter are my favorite seasons because of the mood shift in the days.
Not that there’s anything wrong with spring and summer. I love the longer nights.
There’s something about the night sky that has always called to me, so I find the fact that it’s out longer during that time to be a beautiful thing.
If you’re a person of the day, that’s amazing for you, but I’m a man who appreciates the beauty of the night, the haunting quality of a quiet city lighting up in the distance while stars overhead twinkle and hum their celestial songs.
And speaking of such categorization, some of my books are day books, and some are night books.
My upcoming short story collections—Glassy Night Reveries and The Night Blooms Infernal—will both be collections that take place more at night than during the day, even if some sections of the stories take place during the day depending on the story’s needs.
My feelings are such that having certain settings also categorizes them as part of your writing process, including the season and the feel of a book, which is crucial for getting the atmosphere correct.
Creating a book out of nothing, ex nihilo, takes a lot of thought and careful construction.
It’s not something that pops into your mind in one second and is instantly done for you.
That’s not how it works.
But part of creating these novels means hey, this is my spring book for the year. This is my fall book of the year.
Not literally. You might actually release them inversely to each other. You might release your spring book in the fall and the fall book in the spring, and it’s not any less valid.
This is a strange way of looking at writing books, but the cycle of day and night and the seasons gives me an understanding that helps me nail atmosphere and theme.
Sometimes, I might be outside dictating, and the feel of the cool fall air on my face might help me better describe it in the prose.
No matter what method we’ve used to write our stories, the wisdom of the changing seasons will always have a certain aesthetic reign over our writing.
