In an age of overwrought cinematic universes and
Space Jam sequels, it sometimes seems as though there's no more room for good old-fashioned fun with webs of interconnected stories. Setting all your stories in a shared universe has somehow become
uncool. Well, nuts to that, I'm doing it anyway.
So, here is an incomplete list of connections between my various works, professional and otherwise…
I used to run
a Tumblr blog in-character as a version of Disney's
most elusive of characters, the Haunted Mansion's Hatbox Ghost. My version of “Hattie” came with a legal name (Horatio Topper), backstory and personality all my own. In the very cool Rain N. Thirteen's
very cool Charlie's Head Is In The Hatbox fan webseries, my Horatio was one of multiple fanmade variants of the Hatbox Box pulled out of their home continuities for a silly crossover event.
Finally, in 2020, Horatio, stripped of his hatbox and other Disney-originated elements, made the jump to non-fan-media when he turned up in Lord Thymon's closet in
one of my
Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids stories. This, along with further appearances he's made in the series, take place an arbitrary amount of time after Rain's as-yet-uncompleted series, and feature Horatio's further bumbling across the Omniverse as he tries and fails to get home.
The original blog's Hattie also sometimes interacted with
Beauregard Solomon Ghast, of Myrriah Hopkins's
Ask the Ghost Host blog, who was the author of a
Compendium on Ghost Physics. With due permission from Myrr, B. S. Ghast's
Compendium on Ghost Physics was later spotted on the
Doctorr Smith Shelf in my
P.R.O.B.E. story
Out of the Box