WELCOME TO MY THREE LITERARY WORLDS

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Some of the cards in the Moira Deck I’m creating for my third universe, Reuel.

Today, I want to talk about worlds, specifically shared, literary worlds. No writer of fiction is setting their story in the real world. They may try to make it as close to the real world as possible, but both the limitations of not being omniscient and the fact that you’re making stuff up prevent it. I don’t even try. Stephen King famously got frustrated with a story set in a place he hadn’t lived, and to counter criticisms of inaccuracy he later declared it to be in a parallel universe. They’re all parallel, Steve baby.

While I’m mentioning King, I do share something in common with him in that I love shared worlds – places where characters in separate stories may not run into each other but could. In fact, I have three distinct shared worlds in which my stories take place.

The first is the PoolVerse. It is named for what drew me to writing The Pool Girl: an image of sunlight on cool waters, a symbol of relaxation and positive experiences. The PoolVerse is modeled very closely on our real world, but it’s just a bit nicer. Some problems, like unwanted pregnancy and diseases, happen less. Politics don’t tend to come up and people are a little nicer on average. Bad things do happen to good people and the characters are ones we want to see happy. The stories do not always have traditional happy endings but they aren’t tragic. The books are not necessarily romantic but some form of love is always present. The stories are generally uplifting romance and erotica.

Current Stories in the PoolVerse:

• The Pool Girl
• One Thousand Cranes
• Trapped in the Stacks
• Fuck
• Catgirl From Saturn
• How Sweet It Is
• A Taste of Mint

So, does this mean Sakura from One Thousand Cranes could be reading the comic written by Misamo in Catgirl from Saturn? Absolutely. Melissa, from The Pool Girl, plays Sakura’s games.

Next is the UmbraVerse, a world that is like our real world, but if the Pool Verse is nicer, the UmbraVerse has a shadow cast over it. It is set in the modern day, but elements of pulp and noir are amplified. Also, magic is real, though not known to the general populace and secret parties struggle to both save and destroy the world.

Currently, my only published story in this genre is associated with my newsletter – RedTennis63 – but I have many future stories set in this world. One series, a trilogy that starts with First Date, has erotica elements in it, though it is uncommon for stories set in this world. Where it appears, sex is a thematic component of bindings between certain characters.

Finally, Reuel is a world and the name of the actual planet. This is a fantasy world at the stage of the European Renaissance in terms of technology, though Victorian ideas of futurism and advanced clockwork technologies exist as well. It is set very much in a world that tabletop RPG enthusiasts might find comfortably familiar. The first story likely to be published is The Chained Lamp, which is an erotic sapphic story, though it is the only erotic story planned in this world.

Leto Armitage was born in America under a set of circumstances that prophesied that he would one day unite the lost tribes and return the Ever Summer. Somewhere around twelve, he realized he had been left unsupervised and binged too many Arthurian movies in his formative years and that he was just another kid who accidentally got an education while reading above his age level.

By the time he turned old enough to get a passport, he started finding excuses to travel determined to find out what culture, food and women there were to experience. After learning to grill in Oaxaca, do kinbaku in Japan, and being banned from several former Soviet block countries, he returned home to settle down and see what damage he could do locally.

After working jobs including being a short order cook, bodyguarding strippers and professionally doing reader’s advisory for erotica he realized the most reasonable path forward was to become a writer. Today he lives with cats, dogs, and humans who seem to like him despite actually knowing him. He prefers to sit on his back deck, listening to the birds and Barry the Bumblebear bee, while he writes cozy, uplit romance and raunchy erotica.