Breaking the System: When Your Series Sneaks Up on You

So I’m working on a series, A Fairy’s Tale, which so far is made up of a bunch of loosely related twists on ’80s-style horror novels/movies.

Books have rules, right?  Things like, “The magic system, if any, is X” or “The main character gets the most POV chapters” or “The writing style in this book has a 1920s flavor to it, see?”  What the rules are doesn’t matter–as long as they’re appropriate for that book.

I knew that series would have rules, too, but I had no idea how deep that would go.

  • All plots based on ’80s-style horror.
  • The main character is a woman with agency, not just a screaming victim.
  • The “magic” is some kind of weird extra-dimensional science.
  • There are extra dimensions that interact with our own.
  • The “fae” are extra-dimensional beings.
  • The stories center around an unnamed Midwestern college town in the middle of nowhere.
  • It’s easy to cross from the fae dimension to this one in certain areas, of which the town is one.
  • The fae have been trying to hack human genetics so they can long-term make the jump out of their own universe before it gets destroyed.
  • The fae can only stay in our universe so long before they start to fail.  Like days at most.
  • The fae have “powers” that allow them to manipulate non-animate object to make them animate.  The more I find out about the universe, the more I realize this is because the fae, for all that they are afraid of the “Others” destroying their own universe, are using the Others’ techniques–because the imps are definitely something that only the Others should be able to do.
  • The Others want to destroy existence, Cthulhu-style.

TL:DR – Worldbuilding stuff about the rules of the world.

What I didn’t realized was that the series is also built so:

  • There are certain locations in town that have to be mentioned in any modern story, like Betty’s diner and The Page Turner bookstore.
  • If I don’t, the plot gets stuck.

I’ll probably find more things like that.  The subconscious.  It has plans that I know nothing about.  You can find the first novel, One Dark Summer Night, the you-done-meddled-where-you-shouldn’t novel, here.  I’m currently working on Under Twilight’s Spreading Blight, which is the on-a-dare-let’s-go-to-the-haunted-house-for-a-sleepover-what-could-possibly-go-wrong novel.

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