Building this World

I've released a lot of stuff in the last few months. My short story collection, Psychic Surgery, came out at the beginning of summer, and more recently, a pair of novellas. The first, Speak My Name, is the beginning of a short series of stories about a demon bartender, Frank who falls in love with a very special human, Mica who can see everything that he is and still love him. The sequel, Breaking Heaven, will be out in November.

The second is called Your Cruel Fingers Will Close My Eyes, and it is the story of psychic vampire, Albrecht Christian, and his first love, who is also the Loch Ness monster. If Albrecht sounds familiar to you, that means you've read my first novel, Black Light, and thank you for that. Cruel Fingers is a prequel.

So, I was thinking about how tightly all of my fiction is bound together. There are two short stories in Psychic Surgery about Frank, and his companion, Ithuriel that were written long before Speak My Name. There are more stories in that collection that share a diner, a city, with the novella as well. Billy's is the diner that is visited by almost all my characters at some point. Even Albrecht, though he's separated by time and distance from most of my other stories, is certainly tied into the world of Black Light, and Billy’s is there too.

Fiction works like that. I don't write hard science fiction or heroic fantasy, but I built a world for it all the same. In my world I make the rules. Redemption can come from whatever you long for. Monsters find love and make families. And stay monstrous at the same time. And there's a diner called Billy's where everybody is welcome, and the coffee is cheap. Stop by some time.