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?