Note: This content was first published in my newsletter on 15 February 2023.

***

During one of my recent aimless drives, I started contemplating how various stories from the same story world fit together.

For example, I would love to write another single witch's guide to dating featuring Nick Kinley, the twin brother of the titular character in the Vanessa Kinley, Witch PI Series. Novella-length stories (like the Single Witch's Guides) make wonderful additions to multi-author anthologies or as reader magnets (read: free stories) for new and existing readers.

I'm not sure where Nick's story would fall in the timeline for his sister's four-book series. Those books are set beginning in the summer of 2021 (for The Single Witch's Guide to Online Dating), with a jump ahead to autumn of that year for the first novel, Between a Witch and a Hard Place. There's a short break between novels two and three, with the second book (A Witch and Her Familiar) ending on Thanksgiving 2021 and the third book (Black Witch Rising) picking up after the first of the year in 2022.

That month-long gap allows plenty of space for short stories told from Nessa's point of view, or even a novella-length story like another Single Witch's Guide to Dating told from Nick's point of view. The question is, do I want to set Nick's story then, or does his story fall at a different (possibly even overlapping) point in the story world's timeline?

I set specific real-world dates for the events in fictional stories so that I can keep the latter straight and calculate things like birthdates and such.

A great example of this need for a logical and well-dated timeline is the origin stories in the Sunshine Walkingstick story world. When I wrote Hunter, Sunny's main prequel, I had to know exactly when it fell as compared to other events, like when her son Henry Carson Walkingstick was born and when Sunny's father died.

That last event is a particular concern because it set up a cascade effect on the rest of Sunny's life. I had to know when Henry (Sunny's father) died so that I could calculate when other events took place and how the lives various characters mesh together.

Henry the elder has been on my mind a lot lately. I've been playing with the timelines in that story world over the past week, working back and forth between various events in advance of working on stories told from outside Sunny's point of view.

When and how did Sunny's parents meet? Was Sunny's uncle Fame a part of that? Had Fame already dropped out of Georgia Tech at that point? What role did Libby's family play in the Panther Clan prior to Betty Walkingstick assuming leadership? And so on.

Many of these thoughts about timelines and dates were spurred by an invitation to submit a story to an upcoming multi-author anthology, set to release in Spring 2024. I'm trying to hit a balance between the anthology's requirements (including a romantic element) and what you would like to read. Would you prefer another Single Witch's Guide to Dating, a story about Sunny's dad, or maybe another story from a character whose life I haven't explored yet?

You tell me! If you have an opinion, feel free to hit the reply button and let me know.