Series are very popular with romance writers. I’ve never written a series, but I have had characters appear in more than one story. I have also set several stories (and one unpublished novel) in the same location.
My characters Charlotte and Lina originally appeared in my short story Neighbors. That story was originally published by Torquere Books for their lesbian anthology Vamps. It is currently reprinted in the lesbian anthology The Girls Next Door for Bold Strokes Books. That anthology is available at Amazon and at the publisher’s web site.
Today, you may see Charlotte and Lina at their best in my GLBT paranormal shifter romance Full Moon Fever, which is available at Amazon and other distributors. These two women work with a traveling theatrical road show as scenic artists. They paint sets. Charlotte and Lina are joined by my main characters Sam Hightower and Grant Newsome. They also meet up with dancer Luke Pearce. Charlotte and Lina are examples of the double – they look very much alike; so alike they may be mistaken for each other. However, their personalities could not be more different. Lina is quiet and reserved while Charlotte is loud and boisterous. They are two sides of the same coin.
More often, I’ve set stories in the same location. I created Norwich, Massachusetts and the island of Caleb’s Woe, which is located ten miles off the northeastern coast of Massachusetts. Norwich is not far from my home. It’s a sleepy little New England town where all sorts of mysterious things happen. Stephen King did something similar when he created his New England towns with interesting names like Jerusalem’s Lot, Derry, and Castle Rock, all in Maine.
Caleb’s Woe is similar to Nantucket, Massachusetts. It has a tourist trap area where people from around the world shop for t-shirts, sweatshirts, and all sorts of other junk. The restaurants are open, and the seafood is great. The beaches are open, but the water is cold. This is Massachusetts, after all. That scene in Jaws at the beach when no one wanted to get in the water because of the shark scare? The reluctance was real since the locals who were extras knew how cold that water was at the time of filming in June. It’s helps if you are wearing a wetsuit. I’ve set an unpublished mystery novel there, and I’m currently looking for a home for it.
While I have not yet written a series, I do like to revisit characters and locations. I’ve thought of setting a series of novels and more short stories on Caleb’s Woe. Once I find a home for the mystery novel, I will be very happy. In the meantime, I shall set my romances and scary stories in my New England town and on my island.
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Elizabeth Black writes in a wide variety of genres including erotica, erotic romance, horror, and dark fiction. She lives on the Massachusetts coast with her husband, son, and her three cats. Her new GLBT paranormal erotic shifter romance novel “Full Moon Fever” is now available for purchase at Amazon and other book distributors..
Web site: http://elizabethablack.blogspot.com
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New England is full of great settings.
Gloucester is one of my favorites.
Small world, Lisabet. I live in Rockport, which is right next to Gloucester. We’re actually looking into moving there once the quarantine lifts. Rockport is pretty and quiet, but Gloucester is where everything around here is happening.
I’ve not only created the setting for my Free Spirits series (the city of Stallbrook) with a host of characters living there, but a whole fictional sex-positive religion! My publisher asked if I planned for a certain number of books … nope, the possibilities are endless!
The name of Caleb’s Woe suggested a compelling backstory. 🙂
Rikki, that’s awesome. A whole religion! Setting stories in places of your own creation is such a fun thing to do. A religion is especially cool, especially a sex-positive one.
Jean, there is a backstory to Caleb’s Woe, but I don’t include much of it in the mystery I’ve written. I may try to find ways to incorporate the island’s history into the novel. It involves a shipwreck. For the most part, I took what I liked best about Gloucester and Rockport, Massachusetts and put it on Caleb’s Woe. There is a small village near my home called Norman’s Woe, which is how I came up with part of the name. Plus, Caleb’s Woe sounds so very New England. 🙂
New England has so much history. A sex-positive religion set there doesn’t seem completely far-fetched to me. I like to think that at least some of the women charged with witchcraft in the 1600s were simply rebelling against the woman-hatred in Christianity in general, and in Puritanism in particular.
Well, it’s not set in New England, but the Free Spirit Connection would definitely be a counterweight to so many male-dominant, sex-phobic & overly complicated religious groups. It gives me an outlet for a lot of philosophical views, as well as a nice setting for my characters to hook up & embrace a more joyous way of life!
In the course of creating my ethereal aquatic erotica pentalogy, I created an entire fictional coast (although loosely based on the coast of a Greek island) and an entire fictional tropical ocean archipelago. I drew the layouts of fictional towns along the way.
I was going to re-draft the map of my main town where the characters live professional-style using proper map drawing software, but given that it was originally drawn in the book by one of the characters, I am actually going to leave it in the novel “as drawn”, on the grounds that this is how it looked to the characters. It has a certain rough-and-ready charm.