I don’t know why, but my Gryphon Clerks novels seem to come in pairs.

Realmgolds and Beastheads, as well as both having one-word, two-syllable titles, both cover the period of what was afterwards referred to as the Unification War, from different locations and perspectives.

Some key technology used in those books was invented in Hope and the Clever Man, which of course is paired with Hope and the Patient Man.

A minor character in the Hope books, Bucket the gnome, rises to prominence in Mister Bucket for Assembly, which shares a number of characters with, and sets up the background for, the subsequent Illustrated Gnome News.

A minor character in Illustrated Gnome News, Piston the street kid, becomes the hero of the spinoff Realm Agents books. So far, two are published (Capital Crimes and Underground War), but I was determined to write a trilogy for once, so I’m working on a third.

But now I’ve discovered I was actually writing two books at once.

The first book is the action-oriented third book in the Realm Agents series, which is very much along the lines of the first two: a sinister scheme threatens the realm, and Piston and his companions bravely combat it.

The second book is a cozy novel about Piston’s adopted sister Precision and her beloved, and the businesses they start. Because the more I wrote those scenes, the more I wanted to expand on them, to have a farmer’s market scene and a scene where Precision invents kitchen gadgets and a whole secondary thread with their human friends, who they met in Underground War. I even have a couple of themes for it, ideas I want to explore through the characters. So rather than dilute the action with cozy, or break up the cozy with action, I’ve decided to split the whole thing into two books, with an overlapping timeframe and some characters, and even scenes, in common.

I’ve separated off the cozy scenes I’ve already written, and they come to 14,000 words, so I’m going to need all the extra stuff I thought of to get it to novel length. I’ll rewrite a couple of the scenes from different points of view and add them back into the Realm Agents book, since they’re significant to both plots. Part of what I’m doing here is showing that all kinds of stories go on simultaneously, and sometimes they cross over each other.

I’m not a commercial fiction writer – I sell very few books, and probably wouldn’t sell a whole lot more even if I tried a lot harder than I do, since only books that are like all the other books rise to the top of the algorithm, and I don’t want to write those. I write what I like, and I like both action thrillers and cozy fantasy, so I’m going to write one of each and have them joined together by common characters and scenes, and nobody can stop me. (I mean, there are various ways to stop me, but I don’t think anyone will care enough to do so.)

Complicating the simple “Gryphon Clerks come in pairs” story I started with are a few factors.

Firstly, the ending I have for the third Realm Agents novel opens the door for a sequel that takes a bit of a different turn, but still centers on Piston and has him investigating things. So while it is a trilogy, it isn’t just a trilogy. I don’t know when I’ll work on that, though, since I currently have a premise but nothing more than that.

Secondly, I do have an unfinished draft of another novel with an odd couple of Realm Agents (one of whom comes from Beastheads and shows up briefly in one of the earlier Realm Agents books, and the other of whom is from a short story published only for my newsletter subscribers). I may finish it someday, and if I do, it will be part of the same series.

And thirdly, at the moment there’s no pair book for The Rediscovery of Hardlac, and I don’t have any current plans for one. It’s a standalone in the world of the Gryphon Clerks, slightly earlier in the timeline (roughly between the Hope books and Mister Bucket for Assembly). It hardly even has any crossover characters with the other books, but it’s in the same world and continuity, making it a good place to start if you haven’t read any of the other books. Realmgolds and Beastheads were written while I was still learning the ropes, so they won’t give you an accurate idea of what my writing is like now, only what it was like more than ten (closer to 15) years ago. Even though they’re the first books chronologically (ignoring the early chapters of Hope and the Clever Man, which are set in Hope’s childhood), they’re not where I’d suggest starting. Start with Hardlac, go on to the two Hope books – I still think Patient Man is some of my best work – and then the gnome books.

Or, if you like action, start with Capital Crimes.

Even though I cross over characters and refer back to events in previous books, I always give enough context that you don’t have to have read the earlier stuff in order to figure out what’s going on. My two inspirations for my approach to writing the Gryphon Clerks series are Canadian novelist Robertson Davies and the late lamented Terry Pratchett. Davies wrote “trilogies” that were linked by having characters and locations in common, though the links were sometimes tenuous; a major character in one book would be a minor character in another, and vice versa. And Pratchett, of course, while he has a world that’s all connected and recurring characters who meet and interact and develop across the sub-series that make up Discworld, wasn’t writing a single overarching narrative. He was showing us a world full of stories.

It’s an organic approach to “series,” and it underlines something I believe: everyone’s story is potentially important and interesting. There aren’t just a few heroes and a big crowd of extras. In fact, every minor character I introduce to fill the need of a moment has the potential to become the hero of another book, and several of them have done so already.