Every writer, I think, creates a world—whether they mean to or not. For me, that world began with My Dearest M. It wasn’t planned as a cornerstone or a mythology, but something in its marrow carried the seed of everything that followed. The themes—loss, love, the fragile boundary between life and death, and the ways grief remakes us—echo through The Red Thirst, The Scrying Glass, A Year to Love, and The Forfeit. Different stories, different forms, but the same spiritual terrain. If The Viking and the Princess has a part in this, it is only because of Ireland.
Oh… I seemed to have yet to introduce a few of those titles. I’ll do so at the end.
I don’t think of it as a “shared universe” in the comic-book sense. Rather, it’s a shared existence—a constellation of souls circling the same emotional gravity. The characters are shaped by the same unseen forces: the ache of separation, the search for redemption, the whisper of the divine and the monstrous intertwined. In this sense, My Dearest M is the Bible of that world—the living document that holds its emotional and thematic DNA. Every work since is a commentary, a dream, or an echo of that first revelation.
It helps me to remember certain aspects of grief, of shame, of the various places I’ve been too in Ireland, using those places as backdrops to that work. There are so many people I’ve met in my time here that I do want to honor for the gifts they have offered me.
In this world I’m building, My Dearest M exists both as story and artifact. Within The Forfeit, it appears as a film—a passing cultural reference that sparks a conversation about love and identity in a speculative age. In A Year to Love, the same truths unfold in sunlight instead of shadow, with hope taking the place of despair, and the first-person intimacy of My Dearest M expanded into a third-person chorus. Each story becomes a new dialect in the same emotional language, a reimagining of what it means to lose and find oneself in another.
What fascinates me most is how each story refracts the same truth through a different lens. The man confronting his own ghost in The Red Thirst, the seeker gazing into the depths in The Scrying Glass, the lover learning to live again in A Year to Love—they all belong to the same spiritual family. Their worlds overlap not through plot but through pulse, through the shared language of haunted hearts and sacred wounds.
Both The Red Thirst and The Scrying Glass actually operate in a shared universe. I have this idea around Beli Mawr. If you know, well, you know. And, aye, Farren’s has made it into at least two of the works.
The Forfeit, which I haven’t introduced yet, is speculative fiction exploring identities in a world where Jung’s metaconsciousness is proved real and can be manipulated. The Scrying Glass, a horror novel about a possessed mirror told across two timelines, one family—and The Viking and the Princess, a tale about a captured Irish lad navigating 10th-century Viking raids in Ukraine, trying to find his way home to Donegal.
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