Princes' Game Readers' Guide: Introduction and Ratings Info (Patreon)

Okay, so I'd love you guys to check me on this one, so I'm going to let you have a look at each section as I finish it. Tell me if there's something I need to add or change or clarify, please?

Obviously this is all massive spoiler material. I'm going to put enough text in front of it that you hopefully won't see it unless you click on the 'read more' thing. (Please, Patreon, give us spoiler formatting. >.>)

So, first. I don't know what to call this thing. Readers' Guide makes it sound like something you'd take to a book club to get discussion points. Study Guide is worse. Synopses is too generic to get the point across. Ideas on this welcome?

Here's the Introduction, and the information about ratings.

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INTRODUCTION

The Peltedverse is intended for everyone. There are gentle stories, and adventure stories; there are romances and war stories. There’s epic, enormous conflicts, and gentle, intimate ones. It’s supposed to reflect real life that way: a kind reflection, where people might struggle but they triumph. One of the other ways it reflects life, though, is that world-changing events are powered by violent conflicts, and the people who can no longer bring themselves to open their newsfeeds feel lost. In real life, that’s bad enough, but it’s a special kind of awful in fiction, which is where you turn to when you need to escape for a while.

In the Peltedverse, it’s the Princes’ Game series that’s making the equivalent of headline news, and I know, because a lot of you have told me, that it’s not your cup of tea and that you wish I hadn’t put so much important stuff in it because you felt left out. That this universe, which you’ve used as your escape, has books in it you feel you have to avoid, and that this makes you feel excluded.

This is totally uncool, and I have decided to fix it.

Enter this guide, which synopsizes each book of the Princes’ Game series. These aren’t back of the book blurbs, intended to entice you into reading the books (though if they work that way, great!). These are honest-to-goodness synopses, definitionally full of spoilers, and by the time you’re done reading them you should have all the context you need for future books. You’ll even be able to re-read Dreamhealers and Her Instruments and see things in them that you might have missed.

Does this guide replace the experience of reading the series? Unfortunately not. My books depend on every scene; I often think of their emotional climaxes as having to be earned by all the things that come before. The Princes’ Game series is, in effect, a single story culminating a redemption arc that needs six books to earn that pay-off. No matter how hard I try, I’m not going to be able to duplicate that experience by summarizing what happens. That’s for the best, though, because otherwise why go through all the work of writing them…! And maybe some of you will want to give the series a try if you’re armed with the spoilers; I often do that myself, and in fact I had an awful experience with a really lovely book because I wasn’t forewarned that it had a happy ending, and I felt jerked around by the middle parts where it felt like things would never work out. I would have loved that book had I been prepared (it was The Goblin Emperor). So if you feel like you want to jump into the series after reading the synopses, do that! But if the synopses make you feel like it was a good decision to keep the series at arm’s length, that’s awesome too. Those of you who have read the series might enjoy it as a refresher now and then, or for the insight into my brain. Or you might even have missed some of the things I’m talking about… you never know! 

All I want for this guide is for everyone to feel like they’re on the same page, no matter what they’re comfortable reading.

Having said that, this whole thing is a little tongue in cheek. I think humor helps keep the hard stuff a little more distant, and it also makes the synopses less dry. Plus, it’s kind of an absurd exercise, trying to turn 600,000 words worth of story into a few pages! I figured I’d have fun with it, and maybe you would too.

But enough with the jawing. Let’s get to the story. Compressed.

A Word About Ratings

I’d give the entire Princes’ Game series a global rating of R (by the movie scale). Lots of violence and sex of various kinds, but not blow-by-blow graphic about any of it. Most of my scenes use “snapshot moments”... I’ll pick one detail that makes it feel real but I won’t linger, and for the most part I’m less interested in the physical reality of what’s happening and more in the emotional one. I don’t really care how someone gets tortured. I want to know what went through their head while it was happening. (This is what makes it hard for a lot of people, I’ve been told.) So that’s the tone of the whole series. Different installments in the book have slightly more or less of all this stuff, and the type of violence or sex changes. I’ll try hard to tell you the nuances.

If reading a synopsis of things happening to people is troubling to you, please be forewarned about the entire Study Guide; I don’t go into detail, but I will tell you that things happened, and often to characters you care about. Be prepared and read (or skim) when you’re ready.