Wednesday Wanderings

I don't tend to write in the same world - or even the same cosmology - very often.  I've spoken occasionally that I admire writers who work like that and enjoy it:  on the purely mercenary end, I have an inkling it probably is a surer route to building a fanbase.  Unfortunately, I just have way too much fun with the nuts and bolts of worldbuilding and a short attention span.  (Well ... as short as a novelist's attention span can be.)

However, recently, in contemplating some of my projects that haven't been in what I like to call my wheelhouse - "secondary world fantasy" - I've detected an amusing possibility.  Follow along with me:

Flow is contemporary fantasy - specifically, set in the late Aughts (2000 - 2009) before mobile technology exploded - with a backdrop secret history of fairy incursion and underwater sorcery.

Scylla and Charybdis is soft science fiction, set in a future where humanity departed Earth and colonized a handful of planets.  Travel and communication with the homeworld was always cumbersome because there nearest wormhole to Earth was several light-years away, and in the chaos of Y-Poisoning, the colonies lost contact with Earth.

My new novel project is ... uh ... post-apocalyptic science fantasy?  Let's go with that.  The premise is that magic exploded into the world through virtual reality, both mutating the human environment and opening portals to other worlds.  (It has been left open whether or not any magic existed within this world before.)

So since the existence of magic was hidden in Flow, it's quite possible that book could be history for the other two stories.  And there's even an argument for "magic" in Scylla and Charybdis:  Gwydion (among others) has hypermental abilities, which are presumed to have a scientific basis (look at studies of extrasensory perception, etc) ... but who is to say?  (Me, obviously.)

Looking further, again, the people in Scylla and Charybdis have lost contact with Earth.  What if, in the interim, things have turned very strange indeed?

I didn't set out to connect these storylines, nor am I completely sure that all the small detail facts - dates, background information, etc - line up.  But it's certainly an entertaining thought, and with Scylla and Charybdis pending edit and the new novel as yet unwritten, I could easily plant hints and Easter Eggs.

Oh, I probably won't; there's nothing really to be gained, and the downside is that it limits my options in all three venues - Flow is in finalized form, and I have pondered writing a sequel.  But then again, you never know ...