Have you ever looked back one day as an author and realized how your world ballooned? I just did this morning. I’ve been writing for nine years now, mostly in the lane I call the Legacy Universe, a fictional realm wherein superhumans were made in the 1870s and this caused history to change in big ways, while other things remained the same. It began with writing a short story about one of the main characters, Flag Banner Epsom, ‘Caddywhompus Cascade,’ that appeared in the now defunct Fiction Magazines. That one got me out of a near lifetime of fear of failure that kept me from being a writer. I turned 40 that year.

That story would later show up in the back of my first novel, An Unsubstantiated Chamber, along with others. The Legacy Universe went out into the public, a steampunk/superhero conglomerate that spoke of Gothic mystery on city streets, disability, and the neverending struggle of morality. That book produced two sequels, with a fourth in production.

But between books one and two I began outlining the future of that book’s timeline. Just how did paranormals change the world? As I followed the course of time and considered this, new ideas popped into my head. And with them, new stories.

This put me at a crossroad. Do I stay on course and chronicle the late 19th century and its fight for paranormal rights, or do I get out these stories growing in my head?

I’m a pantser. Of course I wrote them, lol!

I jumped ahead to the Sky War (picture WWI and WWII together and the Axis wins) to tell Perilous Ping, a sordid tale of wartime grief. Then I went further afield into the 1920s because I love decopunk and Dada art, to tell A Scar On The Manifest, a bizarre, quixotic tale of a murder and the Surreal Sleuth on the case. I hopped back to tell of the Spaceman’s trip to the Moon several years before Chamber, The Blossom Of Hours, then dug into the adventures of the Tickertape Tommies subculture.

In two years I had worked out the Legacy Universe over the course of fifty years.

Then, after a bout of personal issues, I jumped back on the wagon. Now you can read an LU story from the old Western age to the decopunk 1920s and 30s on Wattpad to a space rocket tale, and if you get the amazing Black anthology Spyfunk!, you can read about Bet, a spy in the Legacy Universe of the 22nd century fractured America.

And over on Kindle Vella, I’ve turned the Legacy Universe into the Legacy Multiverse with the addition of NoiRythmia, a gothpunk tale that takes place in a dimension just to the left of the LU, along with a fantasy tale called Ancestral Engines. A Cit Called the Rail lays down a story taking place in a year just beyond right now.

Looking back, I realize just how much I expanded on the LU and how it exploded like a Big Bang. You’d think I would have considered this long ago, but pantser me just runs ahead. Every once in a while, my brain forces me to gaze backward and benefit from hindsight. It helps.

It helps me to realize I want to expand this even more, and I’m planning to. Yes. Planning. It happens every now and again. I am in the process of revisiting many of these previously mentioned eras, and going far beyond them. Stay tuned.

For those reading this who are authors, have any of your worlds expanded far beyond your original goal? And if so, how fast was it? Did you plan any of it, or did the Muse take over?