So as you might have noticed, I’ve published two books right now, and neither of them is a direct sequel or prequel to the other. I’m building a universe with, at the moment, two separate plotlines, and while I probably should have finished one before writing the other, now that I’ve started I intend to switch back and forth freely, with abandon.

The general name for the books is The Expatriate Collection, because each plotline deals with people who have had to leave the land of their birth in order to find out who they are and grow into a mature adult. It is urban fantasy, as you discover in Eileen’s book Wolfbound, and consists of two worlds connected via magic, as you discover in John’s book The Hunt. The magic primarily traces back to faeries, most of which live in the alternate faerie world but a few of which slip into our world every now and then to wreak havoc among the mundane mortals.

The first book published in the world was Wolfbound, and as such, it’s the roughest with regards to worldbuilding since I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing with it. Wolfbound is a novella, because I don’t really write long books, and is intended to be the first book in a trilogy. The next two books I’m tentatively calling Bloodlust and Sun-kissed; Bloodlust is being written now, and I talked about its progress some in my last blog post. Sun-kissed is still in the planning stages.

The second book published is The Hunt, which follows a totally different cast (with one exception). While Wolfbound is a coming of age story (is that the right term when it’s twenty-somethings discovering themselves instead of teenagers?), The Hunt is the story of a man who doesn’t know his own past but understands very well who he is now. In essence, they’re opposites; Eileen knows how she got here but has no idea where “here” is, metaphorically speaking, while John can explain a lot about who he is but has no idea how he got here. Both characters are trying to discover themselves, but in very different ways.