I was being a bit of a geek the other day and looking into the Transformers time lines on Wikipedia and it got me thinking about time lines of what I write.  At the moment I have my Vampire short story series, Project Apollo and Project Phoenix that all have quite a lot of time details to work with.  My Vampire stories were originally meant to be set up so it was same universe and the odd character would be in multiple stories here and there but it’s turned into a series where one character in particular has taken the reins of the series.  So I have had to alter how I am setting these stories up a little.  I still want them to generally be stand alone stories in the way that the reader does not need to read them in any particular order, or all of them, but reading them in order will, hopefully, make the universe and all in it a stronger and more fulfilling reading experience.  To make this work though I have to know and make sure that the time lines tie in properly.  If story one does not tie in with story four then the whole series will fall apart.  I’m thinking of putting these stories into a collection as opposed to trying to get them printed individually, but that’s for another post.

With Project Apollo me and Owen need to make sure that what we write now in the universe ties in properly with how we want Apollo to go.  Let me just say that at the moment we only have a rough out line for Apollo, and the story that we are working on at the moment happens after Apollo and involves the major characters from Apollo, albeit in a minor way, so we have to be thoughtful of that as we’re working on this smaller story because Apollo is the bigger story.

As for Project Phoenix that universe has a potential time line that spans across several decades, so it has a lot more to work into it.  That’s a long way off being re-written though.  I’ve got to re-read this story and see if it can be saved, I’d like to think that me and Owen will be able to resurrect it one day but we have Project Apollo and all the universe that is set in on our minds and I also have so many projects of my own that I’m working on.  So Project Phoenix may have to wait for its resurrection.