Single Universe

[StacyXLawrence]

Since I started writing erotica stories a few years ago, one of the ways I’ve entertained myself is by making sure every story is set in the same world. By that I mean no one story is in an alternate universe from any other story - and even further, I’ve made that concept more concrete by making sure at least one person in every story or series is connected in some way to a person in at least one other story or series.

For example, in “Twin Some, Lose Some,” the MC’s college roommate talks about her sister a bit. That sister is a character in a completely different series (that I’ll get around to finishing and publishing one of these months). In part two of “The Third Wheel,” the wife from the first threesome talks about her mother - and that mother is a character in another series I’m writing that takes place thirty years earlier.

I know it sounds a little obsessive but I also find it legit fun to do - force myself to plan around a certain “reality” that I’ve created for the characters. Anybody else do anything like this?

 

[BeechLeaf]

A number of authors do something like this. FrancesScott, HelenL, and THBGato come to mind immediately: all have interconnected characters, not a single series but a shared community, and I'm doing that too.

 

[MrPixel]

I write three separate worlds with no logical need to cross, but I did have one story where a FMC crossed into another. The result was lots of fun, with the FMC "calling home" every night to catch-up her lovers with the "trouble" she was getting into while away: Barstow - Back in the Swing. That story taught me the lesson of making sure all names were different in different universes. The MMCs in the two worlds had the same name, which created some confusion I had to write around.

 

[Rob_Royale]

Tried it. Failed.

 

[Writer61]

Anybody else do anything like this?

Yes. In principle, all of my stories are set in the 61verse, although not all have an obvious connection.

Since stumbling upon the idea of linking stories together, I've really enjoyed spotting shared characters, locations, etc. Most of my series connect to another one. My current WIP includes a location and character that I first used several series ago. Two series in the pipeline are linked over time through a family relationship.

 

[Britva415]

Among commercial novelists, it's something I feel Michael Connelly has done a good job at, across dozens of books. And in my headcanon everything Lawrence Block has written is in one universe, too, even though character crossovers aren't a major feature of his corpus.

 

[SimonDoom]

Tried it. Failed.

Hats off to you for at least trying it.

This is one of those ideas that makes me think, "That sounds neat. I think I'll try that." But it never gets off the ground.

For instance, I've thought about writing a series of stories that take place in a fictional small city or suburb where on the surface everything seems very conventional and middle-America, but underneath the surface there are all kinds of weird sexual exploits going on. I've outlined and started a few stories, but never done anything more than that.

 

[MrPixel]

For instance, I've thought about writing a series of stories that take place in a fictional small city or suburb where on the surface everything seems very conventional and middle-America, but underneath the surface there are all kinds of weird sexual exploits going on.

IOW, 1950s US suburbia.

 

[SimonDoom]

IOW, 1950s US suburbia.

Yes, although I think it applies just as well to 2026 as to 1956.

 

[Britva415]

on the surface everything seems very conventional and middle-America, but underneath the surface there are all kinds of weird sexual exploits going on.

Sounds identical to conventional middle-America to me

 

[TheLobster]

Tried it. Failed.

I'm not even trying. It's already hard enough to maintain consistency across a single story, let alone a series, let alone a universe of interconnected storylines

 

[alohadave]

Steven King has tied many of his books together into a single universe by having characters from one book make cameos or appearances in other books.

Like two of the 50s kids from IT make an appearance in 11/22/63.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I know it sounds a little obsessive but I also find it legit fun to do - force myself to plan around a certain “reality” that I’ve created for the characters. Anybody else do anything like this?

Most of my story cycles interconnect in one way or another, often through side characters getting a story of their own. Mostly though, through the common male characters, who are versions of me at different ages.

My Alex character, for example, gets the university era stories, and goes through to his late twenties, early thirties, with different leading women. Then there's David, in his forties, who gets with Bec and Grace; and later on, Emma and Bobbie.

Adam is the luckiest bugger though, he's the latter day version, fantasy older man, younger woman stories. My Floating World series pairs him with various younger women, nearly all inspired by various women I've met in cafès, casual meetings on the street or on the morning commute. He also gets with the fabulous Ruby, a femme fatale who got an LA Noir story of her own.

More recently, Adam's Floating World coincided with the Emma and Bobbie world, when he meets Bobbie on a flight, and they both hook up with Lisa, who looks after her passengers in Row 6.

I write mostly contemporary stories with real world settings (places where I've lived at different periods of my life), so there's no fantastic world building as such - I just buy coffee or get on a bus, meet the young go-getter at work, that sort of thing.

 

[IWroteThis]

Generally speaking, no.

Even my Master PC stories (of which only one has been finished and published) that are set in the same universe don't really intersect. They basically have the Master PC program and Kismet, Kansas, USA in common. Even then, I added a "customization" step to each install so that the program is tailored towards the MC and story line.

That said, as I occasionally write sequels, I could see myself writing spinoffs as well. I just don't see myself tying stories together for no other reason. I struggle enough with consistency throughout a single story.

Also, I've had some not so pleasant experiences with stories from single universe writers. I won't name names, largely because I'm too lazy to go looking for the stories to find the name… Anyway, this one writer includes a section at the end of the story explaining what other stories each character can be found in, so you can go read those stories to get the background information needed for the story you just read to make sense. Of course, they're in a variety of categories, so I'm not interested in reading some of them.

I think the idea of just nods to other stories would be a much better approach, but still not my thing.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

Currently doing it, but not with everything that I have planned out. Originally I wanted to make all these universes, but sooner I realized after being struck with Worldbuilder's disease that I'm just ovecomplicating things. So, everything that has neon-noir, urban fantasy, or cyberpunk to it, shares the same universe. My high fantasy things will also take place in the same universe, which is my D&D campaign setting, and I designed it to be so vast that it pretty much follows the same anthology logic as Final Fantasy, in which each entry is always a different universe with a different story, but some spells and some systems remain familiar. The only ones I'd call different are the stuff that I have planned out for sci-fi, and the reason is because each one of my ideas requires to stand out on their own rather than have them all in a single place.

But I'm just talking too much at that point. The Woman at the Speakeasy was just a beta testing, but I'd say it does count as part of my neon-noir universe. No Heroes in Love, Silhouette, and Nightcall, and more incoming works all take place in the same universe. Actually, Sabrina and Natalya live in the same apartment building, but in different floors.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Also, I've had some not so pleasant experiences with stories from single universe writers. I won't name names, largely because I'm too lazy to go looking for the stories to find the name… Anyway, this one writer includes a section at the end of the story explaining what other stories each character can be found in, so you can go read those stories to get the background information needed for the story you just read to make sense. Of course, they're in a variety of categories, so I'm not interested in reading some of them.

That might have been me. I have one self-referential story which goes very meta, where a character in a story recognises an encounter which begins another story and thinks, "That might have been me." She gets in touch with the author, finds out that it was indeed a chance encounter on the street which inspired the first story.

They meet, and over the course of their story she asks him, "What was that story about?" - him being a writer and all. There's a section at the end that links to all of the internally referenced stories.

Maddy, who I really did meet in the street, was gorgeous, enough to write two completely different versions of her.

The stories weren't in too many, oh my god, I don't like that, categories, so maybe it wasn't me after all. Or if it was, you must be very delicate .

 

[IWroteThis]

That might have been me. I have one self-referential story which goes very meta, where a character in a story recognises an encounter which begins another story and thinks, "That might have been me." She gets in touch with the author, finds out that it was indeed a chance encounter on the street which inspired the first story.

They meet, and over the course of their story she asks him, "What was that story about?" - him being a writer and all. There's a section at the end that links to all of the internally referenced stories.

Maddy, who I really did meet in the street, was gorgeous, enough to write two completely different versions of her.

The stories weren't in too many, oh my god, I don't like that, categories, so maybe it wasn't me after all. Or if it was, you must be very delicate .

No, the author I'm referring to writes all of their stories in the same universe, and mostly in the same town. It's a very small universe, apparently, as single-story characters seem to be rare.

 

[Britva415]

I regard my stories as sharing a "single-universe" setting only because they're supposed to be set in a consistent version of "the regular real(istic) world."

I have no plans for any characters to cross over into other characters' stories, but there's no in-universe reason they couldn't.

 

[FromManyOne]

By word count, most of my writing here spins off my first story, "Coffee With Blushes." That story has three named characters.

Liz got her own series, "Liz Enslaved." Maria got two where she visits a tack shop. Rick got a novella and a book-length story, both called "Pranked". Rick's mom has a friend, Maureen, who also got two stories. I'm working on a continuation of Liz's story now.

But over in Pranked: Barbie (the novel featuring Rick), there's a slight crossover with The Wizard from "Harmless." And "Swarmed" and its now-in-first-draft sequel take place in the same universe as "Harmless," so that connects. I have plans to eventually link in some of the other stories, but some are meant to be fully separate.

 

[Voboy]

I know it sounds a little obsessive but I also find it legit fun to do - force myself to plan around a certain “reality” that I’ve created for the characters. Anybody else do anything like this?

Yep.

It's fairly common here. Not "here" on Lit, per se, but "here" in the AH.

The real fun comes when you write something supernatural or SF... those are tough to shoehorn into a universe. And yes, it is legit fun to do.

 

[Stanfield2025]

Absoluely. I've done it with my erotic stories. Not all are connected to each other, but one of the stories is a spin-off that stars a side character from another story. Though, since I've only written femdom on Lit, I can't put every story in the same town as it would be super weird for one town to churn out so many tall, dominant women.

As a fanfic writer on AO3, I'd like to think I'm pretty good at keeping things consistent to a single fictional universe.

 

[Rob_Royale]

The problem for me was that, as Stephen King wrote, 'there are other worlds than these'.
And I found that I wanted to dabble in them all. Fantasy, alternate realities, other planets, in the past, in the future, in legend, in Pornville, in Wonderland. As tidy as writing about a single universe would be, with overlapping stories and characters, I just couldn't stick to it with so many other worlds to visit. So, my weak attempts created stories that had to be re-edited later to eliminate all the dead ends I'd created by not sticking to it.
If this is what you're into, I wish you success with it. But it's gonna take more discipline than I've got or wish to have.

 

[JohnBJohn]

Tried it. Failed.

It isn't easy! I had two separate series and I needed a name for the mother in each story. Unoriginally, I picked Mary for both mothers. Two separate stories, two separate series, it won't matter. However, they are in my same written universe and their children have met. So then I start a story (since abandoned) about the two sets of parents. How confusing is it when two of the main characters have the same name! The story ended up being almost all sex and I became bored with writing it and not happy with the minimal plot. I do hope to bring the two sets of parents together again in the future.

 

[JohnBJohn]

I'm not even trying. It's already hard enough to maintain consistency across a single story, let alone a series, let alone a universe of interconnected storylines

I've started to keep notes, mainly character descriptions at this point.

 

[JohnBJohn]

Most of my stories are in the same universe and the characters all live in the same general area within the city. The older teens mostly all went to the same high school and are now starting to meet up again in college. The older folks pop in and out of the various stories. As I write a new story and introduce a new MC, I'll drag in characters from other stories to interact with them.

I enjoyed this with other stories that I've read, how one character falls in one story, but is redeemed in another. I really liked to see how the characters that this author wrote grew and changed over time.