I've decided to develop the characters and world in my story Citrus Asphyxia, and write a series of detective stories. I've always thought it would be cool to write a series of stories that all fit neatly together in the same world, and the Sherlock Holmes stories made me a big fan of detective fiction. Plus, when I wrote Citrus Asphyxia I loved the licence for invention that it gave me: any little surreal idea I had fit perfectly into the story. Then I came up with an idea for a new freaky character and he seemed to slide into that world, so I thought why not resurrect Forbes and make him a character in a number of my stories?
One thing I've always loved about Bret Easton Ellis' novels is that a minor character in one could leap out and take centre stage in another, that his small world of young, disaffected Americans really do breathe the same air and hang out together, and there's no reason why they shouldn't inhabit the same pages. For me, it led a real credence to the world-building of the Ellis novels, as if they were taking place in a parallel universe to our own. I want to do the same with the Citrus Asphyxia stories, to create a bunch of characters that exist together, even though they might not appear in the same stories or ever meet. So I'm going to revise Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe detective stories and read Raymond Chandler novels for inspiration, and set up a series in which each story will focus on a different freak as Detective Forbes wades through madness to try and apprehend them. I think this might help me a lot with building a convincing novel-sized world, without the pressure of writing an entire novel in one go. Stay tuned for more!
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