Monthly Archives: April 2017
Building a Shared Universe
In letting Series2:Book 1 (which I haven’t totally settled on a title for yet, but I’m leaning toward “Loyalty Betrayed”) settle for a few months, I turned my attention to planning for another part of the Griffins & Gunpowder world. Typically I’ll take this time to write short stories that expand the world in some small way, or give background to a character or situation. This time it was all about world building.
The problem that I ran into was that I had two different story ideas that I wanted to work on: a political intrigue drama and a criminal empire story. They’re both set in Post-Series 2 Andivar, so they already shared a bit of the same storyline so it was a natural leap to have the two loosely connected.
What I’ve found in laying the groundwork for this shared storyline is that a timeline is essential, even if characters from the two stories never cross paths (though in this case, the two stories will cross over at least a couple times, though the interaction in the early going is minimal), it’s important to keeping everything straight. Especially in the age of the internet where readers congregate to put together theories and compare notes.
Have you read any good shared-universe stories? What were some of the things that you liked or disliked about them?
Took A While
But I’ve finally finished marking up the first round of edits for Series2:Book1. This was a “high-level” pass looking for story holes, missing information, too much information etc. I did a little line-by-line editing too, but it wasn’t the focus since I’ll be rewriting quite a bit.
I have to say, it felt good to get this done so I can move on to making the changes, but I’m always astonished/ashamed of the amount of red ink that I lay down in a first edit pass. It’s only a first draft, but I thought it was a lot better when I wrote it. I guess that’s why they tell you to leave a book set for a while before you edit it.
Now I have to go through and apply the changes and then I’ll make a second pass, which will be more line-by-line in nature.
On another note, I’ll developed half a dozen new story ideas (some set in the world of Zaria) that I think will have some promise. They’re WAY down the list, but at least they aren’t knocking around in the back of my head while I’m trying to work forward. =D
Gunpowder Fantasy 