I am...extremely conflicted in my opinions of Todd McCaffrey’s Pern books, but I gotta respect his planning skills. Dude must have had a notebook full of character backgrounds and traits for all the names of minor characters he throws out left and right, only for them to show up again consistently two or three or four books down the road.
Like, I was reading Dragonheart (researching for a shamelessly self-indulgent fix-it fic) today. I always figured J’per was a one-off character where the joke was he fell asleep a lot, but no; he’s timing it in Dragon’s Time and Sky Dragons, so whenever he’s “onscreen,” he’s living in three or four different places at once.
Of course, planning is not the same as plotting a coherent narrative. As much as I dislike his plots (I still have trouble following most of Dragon’s Time), I have to admit I actually find a lot of his characters interesting, especially the minor characters. I wish we’d gotten more of the weyrling classes that timed it instead of focusing on Fiona’s love pentahedron. (Though I would also have taken a proper polyamorous Kindan/Lorana/Fiona/T’mar OT4.)