Why do I think this is different? Well, there are a few things.

1. The threading, as you pointed out, makes it different. I wanted to explore the world of the South Coast and to discover more of the backstory of the whelkies. To do that, I chose to smash the economic story against the spiritual one. The challenge here was to come up with a story that actually required two plot lines to come together. I've read a lot of books with multiple threads that were only tangentially related, but I wanted to do a story where they were actually required to come together in order to complete the strands. Kinda like a piece of rope with a splice in the end.

2. The spiritual story itself makes it different. Ishmael is rather a dim bulb at times and, while he has a spiritual side, it's not overt. Half Share is a story of faith and, while Ishmael gets that in Half Share, I wanted to explore the roots of faith in South Coast in a way that I couldn't in a Share book.

3. The POV is different. All the Share novels are first person point of view. South Coast is third person and we swap back and forth between the two. This gives the story more of a cinematic feel than the Share books. In Ishmael's stories, he's sitting across a table from you and telling you his tales. In South Coast, I wanted to give the perspective of the reader being outside and watching the story unfold in front of them. (Peter Jackson could direct. I'd be ok with that and we could film in New Zealand. Did I say that out loud?)

4. The character development process itself makes it different. It takes a weird twist in the shaman plot line as we watch character development in two different people and not in directions that were telegraphed early.

5. Last is the ambiguity. In the Share books, there's ambiguity caused by Ishmael's ignorance of the world he's entered. He reports what he sees to you as he's telling his story, but his interpretations are sometimes less than accurate. In South Coast, I did not want the Shaman's gift to be … for lack of a better term … spoiled. Because of that, I needed to keep the actual nature of the gift ambiguous. Is there really magic? Or is something else happening? I could write a lot about shamanism, but this construct is a straight translation out of Earthbound traditions. And I've purposely left this ambiguous.

So, from my perspective .. sitting at the keyboard and looking at the stories I've constructed from behind the curtain .. I think this one is very different from the others.

Of course, they all have my rather warped view to bind them so that gives them a lot in common.

Thanks, again, Scott. And I hope you still like it when you get to the ending.

Why do I think this is different? Well, there are a few things.

1. The threading, as you pointed out, makes it different. I wanted to explore the world of the South Coast and to discover more of the backstory of the whelkies. To do that, I chose to smash the economic story against the spiritual one. The challenge here was to come up with a story that actually required two plot lines to come together. I've read a lot of books with multiple threads that were only tangentially related, but I wanted to do a story where they were actually required to come together in order to complete the strands. Kinda like a piece of rope with a splice in the end.

2. The spiritual story itself makes it different. Ishmael is rather a dim bulb at times and, while he has a spiritual side, it's not overt. Half Share is a story of faith and, while Ishmael gets that in Half Share, I wanted to explore the roots of faith in South Coast in a way that I couldn't in a Share book.

3. The POV is different. All the Share novels are first person point of view. South Coast is third person and we swap back and forth between the two. This gives the story more of a cinematic feel than the Share books. In Ishmael's stories, he's sitting across a table from you and telling you his tales. In South Coast, I wanted to give the perspective of the reader being outside and watching the story unfold in front of them. (Peter Jackson could direct. I'd be ok with that and we could film in New Zealand. Did I say that out loud?)

4. The character development process itself makes it different. It takes a weird twist in the shaman plot line as we watch character development in two different people and not in directions that were telegraphed early.

5. Last is the ambiguity. In the Share books, there's ambiguity caused by Ishmael's ignorance of the world he's entered. He reports what he sees to you as he's telling his story, but his interpretations are sometimes less than accurate. In South Coast, I did not want the Shaman's gift to be … for lack of a better term … spoiled. Because of that, I needed to keep the actual nature of the gift ambiguous. Is there really magic? Or is something else happening? I could write a lot about shamanism, but this construct is a straight translation out of Earthbound traditions. And I've purposely left this ambiguous.

So, from my perspective .. sitting at the keyboard and looking at the stories I've constructed from behind the curtain .. I think this one is very different from the others.

Of course, they all have my rather warped view to bind them so that gives them a lot in common.

Thanks, again, Scott. And I hope you still like it when you get to the ending.