Novels are wonderful things. But the volumes of the Hidden Angels series are not novels. They are groups of short stories hung on the framework of an alternate history family saga. Most of the chapters are independent short stories with separate characters, separate protagonists, and separate plots. Many characters only appear in one chapter/short story. Some characters or family branches may have whole threads of stories devoted to them. There are some chapters which are more part of creating the framework rather than separate and independent short stories. These framework stories especially occur in the beginning and first volume. Most of them have Matthew West as a significant character, even if the chapter is not from his perspective.
The closest that these volumes ever come to novels are in large, sweeping themes based on events in history, real or imagined. For instance, in the second volume three of the five text sections are covering the American Revolutionary War. In the first volume, there was a section on the Seven Years’ War. In what currently is planned to be the fourth volume, there is similarly a large portion mostly devoted to the French Revolutionary Wars and related revolutions. Still, the chapters in these sections are relatively distinct short stories. Events do overlap. Sometimes events happening in one chapter do effect events in another chapter. But they are still intended to be volumes of short stories.
It may be that in some ways the structure of these volumes are different from most writing that one encounters. Perhaps it is like Shakespeare’s Histories. They weren’t tragedies or comedies, per se. They were telling tales of history. That is what the chapters within the Hidden Angels series do. They are snippets of a historical family saga. Sometimes, the reason for a chapter is merely to tell how two people got together to marry and produce children. Is that truly a short story in the writer’s sense? Does it have all of the elements of a short story as one might learn them in a creative writing class? Maybe not. On the other hand, chapters of a (good) novel seldom resolve anything until the last chapter. The characters may solve a problem within the chapter, but it usually has little child problems to be resolved later. Thus is born a whole chain or multiple chains of issues to resolve each other in the last chapter. Does that sound anything like what the chapters within this series are? Some, perhaps. So, the chapters within the series may fall into three categories: chapters that move the frame along and may be novel-like chapters, chapters that are really independent short stories, and chapters that are just family history with no great problems to be overcome. That’s my theory for the moment. Perhaps some literature professor will look at it and have another theory?