Getting All Your Ducks In A Row

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Getting All Your Ducks In A Row

May 15, 2026

1–2 minutes

The problem with having a huge sprawling Multiverse to have adventures in, is leaving dangling possibilities all over the place as I pounce happily on the next story idea.

I reformed the Empire of the One until they’re practically the Good Empire, and then moved on to the next Enemy. Sometimes I feel like I’m doing a “lensman” and every time I defeat the Evil Empire, a new one pops up out of nowhere.
Except I do it a bit more like a progression, with the old bad guys turning into the new protagonists.

But this time I’m not going to leave quite so many dangling ends. I shall defeat them utterly.

Bwhahahaha!

No wait, that’s the evil villain laugh. I meant to express calm confidence in my ability to polish things up perfectly. Hahahahaha!

And before I start publishing the New Enemy Stories, I really ought to go back and snip off some old dangling ends . . . might even find some fun characters to ~~abu~~ . . . use. To fight the new bad guys.

I’ll do that while I write the new stuff. Every time I have to stop and think this mess through . . . I’ll pop back and finish an old story. Or like as not start a new one.

Geeze . . . why do they let me write blogs here? No one in their right mind should (dis)organize their writing business like I do!

So tell me? Do you like big multiverses, or do you prefer stories with shorter series each in their own separate universe?

7 responses to “Getting All Your Ducks In A Row”

Draven

May 15, 2026 at 5:26 am

kwak

Reply
jaglionpress

May 15, 2026 at 6:54 am

Maybe it’s a side effect of the Childhood of Moving Around, or the Muses of Authorial Fickleness but I usually tend to start fresh when a new setting starts calling to me. Not necessarily wise because doing all thay under one pen name confuses the algorithm.

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Karen Myers

May 15, 2026 at 7:55 am

From a continuity perspective, I read for characters much more than for settings. A fiction world that follows characters (or at least near family that can refer to them) from series entry event to next series entry event appeals to me much more than one that follows a world from one set of characters to the next set of characters. The latter, for me, is like reading a collection of short stories (I’m more a long story fan) — hard to tell if I’ll find a hook to entertain me for each one.

I enjoy your books, for example, but for me it’s much more like reading long short stories — I don’t have the lust to seek out every example of how the setting evolves and feel like the investment (in characters) is lost when the next one begins. If I could tell more about how individual entries were related as character continuity mini-clusters (I know you do some of that) I’d be happier (marketing opportunity at the blurb/description level, for people like me?).

Different authorial choices, different readers. 🙂 Nothing wrong with that. 🙂

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John

May 15, 2026 at 12:21 pm

Keep on doing what you’ve been doing and seem to love to do.
It’s fun to encounter your previous, and now older characters from time to time.

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TXRed

May 15, 2026 at 1:05 pm

I’m a little wary of multiverses, but that’s because of having been burned (publisher, not author fault). However, I have no problem with Big Huge Setting, and lots of goings on within that setting. I’m a landscape, er, that is, setting sort of reader, sort of like the people who play video games to look at the gardens or explore markets and taverns. A grand setting with adventures here and there, that may eventually tie together, is fine by me.

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Mary Catelli

May 15, 2026 at 5:19 pm

My stories are like oysters: they need their own shell.

All right, I’m working on some sequels. But after scads of short stories and several stand-alone novels. Plus the sequels are of different charaters.

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1. Mary Catelli
  
  May 16, 2026 at 12:59 am
  
  Also time goes up geometrically as I write longer, so there’s that.
  
  Reply