Does Series Order Matter?

I've been thinking lately about books in a series and their order. Can an author skip around in a series timeline? Or does that really bother readers?

Like in my Jarved Nine series, I wrote Ravyn's Flight and Eternal Nights in proper order, but then I skipped ahead to Troll's story in The Troll Bridge. I did it because I was invited to write a story for a collection, but I still had six other books that needed to come first.

Books that I hope to write some day. :-/ (I'd also like to go back and write the full-length version of Troll and Lia's story. It came flooding in while I was writing the short story, but I had to force it aside.)

But what if I skipped around more than that? What if the next story I wrote was say 20 years after Troll's book and then I came back and wrote the stories that happened immediately after Eternal Nights? Would that be annoying beyond words?

This is all hypothetical and I'm working in a completely different world in a completely different sub-genre, so I probably shouldn't even be asking the question now. But I'm curious. Would skipping around in a series timeline be a deal breaker?

FREE! Dark Awakening is Free!

For a limited time, Dark Awakening (my novella set in the Crimson City world) is available for free!  Please pick up a copy and share this news with any other book lovers you know.

Dark Awakening for Kindle


Dark Awakening in EPUB format

Dark Awakening in other formats

Just an FYI, Dark Awakening was first published in 2007 as part of the Shards of Crimson anthology.

About Dark Awakening:

Kimi Noguchi is working as an intern for an advertising agency in Crimson City and she's discovered that she's a kijo or witch. She thinks having talent is cool, but her magic attracts the attention of a power-hungry Bak-Faru demon and she's forced to call on another demon, Nicodemus, for help.

Nic made a promise to stay away from Kimi for her own good, but now that she's summoned him, all bets are off. She's his vishtau mate, a bond held in reverence by all demons, and he's not about to let this opportunity pass him by. Nic plans to protect, woo and win his woman.

Blog Readers

Edits are on their way to NYC. Yea! I ran out on lunch yesterday and mailed them. The temperature was supposed to be warm, but there was a wicked wind blowing hard enough to push the SUV around on the road. That definitely made me wish I could have stayed inside and warm.

I had to download a large file yesterday, and while I was waiting (I hate dial-up!), I added a couple of buttons to the blog. They're down below the blog roll links. One is to subscribe to the blog through Bloglines and the other with Google Reader. I have both, mainly because some site I visited called Google Reader one of the best new web things of 2006. Frankly, I prefer Bloglines because it's faster and I like the set up better, but it's all personal preference so I added both options.

I love blog readers (RSS readers). Without it, I'd hardly be able to read anyone's blog posts because of time. It's so much quicker to have everything on one site. Of course, I have to visit the blog to comment, and since I rarely do that even with the best of intentions, it saves me even more time. :-) I'm slow writer even for things like email and blog stuff. The reader also lets me follow baseball news for my favorite teams. The MLB website has links to each team's feed and I love it. Next year, I won't be sitting there going "What happened to so and so?"

I've tried a few home pages that rely on RSS feeds, but they haven't worked out for me. I don't know why I don't like them since there's no reason why I shouldn't. With some of the modules, my problem is you have to click through to see the information--like comics or horoscopes or something like that. I don't mind just having the news headlines because then I can decide whether or not I want to read more. Does anyone have a home page they really like? I'm open to trying more because I really don't like the one I'm using now real well either, but it's better than anything I've attempted to replace it with. I also need something that loads fairly fast because I have dial up. :-(

I'm working on going to high speed. Kind of. Okay, I made the decision, but now I'm waffling on whether I go with my cable provider or my ISP who offers service through my cable provider. There are too many decisions to make!