I’ve mentioned the origins of Paranormal City in passing a few times, but I don’t think I’ve ever sat down to walk through how an entire dark urban fantasy anthology collection grew out of a single abandoned attempt at an epic novel. So here it is, in full.
The Novel That Stalled
Before any of this, I was working on a fantasy novel titled Opener of the Ways — a proper, ambitious thing I’d started before reading some well-meaning advice about turning Pantsers into Plotters. That advice, as it turned out, was exactly wrong for me. The novel stalled badly the moment I tried to force it into an outline it never wanted. I’ve told the story already in Plotter vs Pantser vs Plantser? if you’re interested in reading it.
The Idea That Didn’t Fit
While that novel sat stuck, I had an idea that didn’t belong in it at all; something that wanted to exist on its own terms, separate from the world I’d been trying to force into shape. I wrote it as a short story instead, just to get it out of my head and let the novel rest for a while.
The story was Michael Sana, the first story in Paranormal City.
Realising I’d Built a World
What I didn’t expect was that this throwaway short story would come with its own fully formed setting: a city where the paranormal sat just beneath the surface of ordinary life, dark and strange. It was clearly large enough to hold more than one story. I had an inkling there was much more to the place, so I immediately wrote another piece set there: Detective Rogers. And then another: Specialist Gordon. Each built on the previous story, as the main character from the other story appeared in a cameo, cementing the fact that they belonged together. More stories followed, almost without effort. I suddenly found myself with an anthology on my hands; one that morphed into an episodic novel.
Before I’d consciously decided to build anything, I’d already built an entire narrative universe. One, moreover, capable of holding almost any genre.
I have ‘lived’ there ever since.
After a while, I realised that there were groups or clusters of stories centred on certain aspects of the City: fairies, the Grim Reaper and its assistants, the immortals who have taken up residence within its walls, a house that can be anywhere and everywhere, and so on. I began to split these into their own volumes. Then came the private detective who works by logic alone, another one who is purely psychic, and the stories within the City’s multiverse that can only be classified as science fiction, etc. The spin-offs still grow, even today, leaving me with over 400 stories so far to slot together, somehow.
One result of all this is that whenever I begin a new story, whether spontaneously or as a result of one of the Writing Gym’s salons, I now run it through a mental filter to determine which of the books it belongs in.
Sometimes, I realised that the new story, along with several others elsewhere in the collection, deserve a book of their own…!
From One Story to an Anthology to a Collection
That’s how Paranormal City and its narrative universe came into being — not as a planned series, but as the accidental by-product of abandoning something else and following a smaller, more honest idea instead. Four more anthologies and eighteen spin-off collections later, it remains one of the clearest proofs I have that Pantsing, for all its chaos, can build something genuinely substantial, provided you trust it enough to follow where it leads.
Sometimes the best worlds aren’t the ones you set out to build. They’re the ones that show up while you’re busy failing at something else entirely.