Like Ducks in a Row: Thinking about M/M Series

I love series books. An author creates a world with a sense of place and a set of rules that are broad enough to be the foundation of multiple stories... Cattle Valley, Hammer, Love Means, EMS Heat, Lady Blue Crew, Wolves of Stone Ridge, Marius Brothers, Midnight Matings, Brac Pack... Okay maybe I have a thing for fluffy shifter books... That is not in any way an insult, I have the utmost respect for the authors who write these series.

My completely unoriginal analogy goes like this... Books are like food. Most books are everyday meat and potatoes meals and a rare few are glorious six course gourmet feasts. Then there is a category I consider snacks. Snacks are enjoyable to read and give you a little pick-me-up to get through the rest of your day. They are small, usually novella-ish (30-40K words). They aren't terribly angsty. They aren't going to change your life. They almost all follow some variation on the traditional romance formula... boy meets boy, boy falls in love with boy, boy loses boy, boy fights to get the boy back. They are like fairy tales where good triumphs over evil, light over darkness and remind us that once in a while, even for the most broken souls, love can conquer all.

An unpleasant trend has cropped up in some of the long standing series that I have stayed with through ten plus books... to the point that I have dropped a few series that used to be an automatic buy. In many series, the backdrop is an overarching story that links all the books together and for me this is where so many writers, even ones I love, seem to lose the plot. (pun totally intended) Some writers seem to let the backdrop story get too complicated and convoluted to the point where they put too much energy into moving the backdrop along at the expense of the romance at the heart of the current book. As a reader, I don't care about the political intrigue in HEA-land except in how it affects the main characters of the book and once guys from a previous book get their HEA, I don't care much about how current events affect them unless it directly impacts the current book. After about five books in a series, I can't keep track of all the characters and relationships anyway especially when the books are separated by three months and maybe 100 other books in between.

I also think that series should be given the opportunity to end naturally. If you set up a series based on five brothers, the backdrop story should resolve when the last brother gets paired off. Moving a series on to a new and perhaps related backstory for another set of characters in the same world is more than acceptable. Lady Blue Crew moving into the Elite Force series did this beautifully.

What do y'all think?

As always, enjoy the eye-candy...

Jae