If you’ve read anything I’ve written or followed me on Bluesky for any amount of time, you probably already know what a hardcore Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan I am. But wanna know I secret? I resisted that show when it first came out. Like, for years. The movie (which I also hadn’t watched at the time) looked, frankly, silly. I assumed the show would be the same, so I skipped it. Later, when I heard people say the show was darker and more serious than the movie, I didn’t believe them.
But then, I read a new short story collection by Charles de Lint, one of my favorite authors. He’d added a blurb before each story, talking about why he wrote it or whatever and, in one of those blurbs, he talked about Buffy. I don’t remember the context of the blurb with the story it came before, but what I do remember is him saying that what he loved about Buffy the Vampire Slayer was how the show had excellent continuity from episode to episode, season to season.
Waifs and Strays by Charles de Lint – the book that changed it all for me.
(Affiliate link, FYI)
That was something that just didn’t happen back then. Sitcoms, especially, seemed to feel free to rewrite their own history every week, and even the dramas didn’t make much effort to carry over the end results of one episode into the following week’s show. The idea of a series staying faithful to its own storyline intrigued me enough to give it a try.
Streaming video wasn’t really a thing yet, but I binged that show like a pro anyway. I rented the discs from Netflix, plowing through them and turning them over twice a week. By the time I got to the end of season two, I couldn’t wait for another mail swap, and I clearly remember my 3 AM trip to the 24-hour big box store to buy season three. (I did not have the money to be spontaneously buying whole seasons of TV shows on DVD at the time, but I was hooked!)
Charles de Lint was right—the continuity of that show was incredible. The thing that kept me engaged, the thing that gave me such a need for the next season that I’d blow money I didn’t have to keep watching, was that I knew the consequences of what I watched in one episode would resonate throughout the next episode, the whole season, and affect the characters’ lives and relationships with one another in a lasting way. It felt real in a way very few shows back then did.
I think Buffy has inspired my writing more than any other source, and certainly in more ways than any other. I may do additional posts, later on, about how Buffy was the first inspiration behind the format I use for most of my fiction now, which is novellas linked in a season/episode format, as well as inspiring my use of “team” dynamics in my storytelling rather than focusing on a single main character. (Note that my “episode” fiction is not incomplete chunks of a single story the way many use that term—they’re complete stories that also contribute to a season arc and series plot development, just like shows such as Buffy do.)
But the aspect of how Buffy inspired me I want to talk about today, probably not surprisingly, that continuity in storytelling Charles de Lint spoke of.
The fact that the mere suggestion of continuity is the thing that got me to give the show a try should demonstrate how important continuity already was to me, but I think Buffy made me see just how powerful it can be in storytelling. And, as much as I hate giving the hateful bitch credit for anything, the Harry Potter books drove that point home as well. I would always re-read the full series-to-date right before the next book came out, but I’d cheat on the first two books and watch the movies instead, since the followed the books very well. Once I got the audiobooks, I went back to the actual books of 1 & 2 for my re-reads and I remember my amazement when, while getting ready for book 5 or 6 and reading/listening to book 1 for the first time in quite a while, I realized she mentioned Sirius Black by name in the first chapter of book one. I remember actually saying out loud “she knew that early!”
I became determined to know my own series storylines that well, too.
When I started writing the Olive Tree Academy series, my goal was to work at least three books deep. What I mean by that is the plan was not to publish book one until book 2 was fully drafted and book 3 was fully outlined. Even better, I’d have loved to not publish 1 until 2 was almost done, 3 was drafted, and 4 was outlined.
I haven’t managed that, but I do have a lot of deep plotting going on: I know the broad strokes of all books in the planned series, know several specific plotlines in detail, and have already planted many seeds that won’t sprout until several books down the line. If you’ve read the first two books (and the prequel short,) you’ve already met some “side” characters who will be mains later, have seen clues you have no idea are clues, have encountered references to things that won’t matter until much later on.
Where I did manage the level of continuity I craved was in The Nexus Season One: Unseen World. Since those were short, I didn’t publish book one until all nine were written. Yes, the later ones still needed a lot of editing by the time I started publishing the earlier ones, but the entire season was in about second-draft form before I did final edits on the first two episodes and let them out into the world.
The benefit of that was that I could double back to plant those seeds, building that continuity across the whole season even when I made a decision or discovery very late in the process. I think this is a lot of what makes The Nexus my favorite thing I’ve written to date.
I’m working on a new (ish) series now, and I’m trying to do the same thing. There was something extra-magickal about The Nexus, and it flowed like nothing else I’ve ever done. This “new” series, Widdershins, has always been my hardest one, which is why you haven’t seen it yet despite it being older than any of my already-published ideas.
Widdershins is my series that’s the most directly inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Back when I first came up with the idea, writing fiction in a season/episode format seemed completely undoable. Ebooks weren’t ubiquitous yet, self-publishing was a lot less viable, and the publishing industry was much stricter about length and category. I simply couldn’t write stories somewhere between a short story and a novella, link them together through a shared plot arc, and call it a series.
You can do it now, though. And well. Writing The Nexus taught me how to write this type of series, and now I’m back at work on my long-resistant darling. It isn’t flowing like The Nexus did—this series never flows easily, which I think is mostly because it’s been around too long and I care too much about getting things “just right.” But it’s moving along.
My hope for a while now has been to start publishing Widdershins episodes on or around Samhain (Halloween) 2026. The ever-looming countdown app on my phone tells me that’s 5 months, 3 weeks, and 1 day from today. And that’s possible, but I don’t think it’s something I’m willing to commit to ahead of time, especially knowing how much this series likes to fight back.
So I think, reluctantly, I’m going to have to push sharing Widdershins with the world into next year. But that’s a good thing, because it gives me the space to do what I did with The Nexus, getting the full season written and worked out before I start releasing things as canon into the world. And that’s important because, just like with Buffy and the many amazing shows that came later thanks to Buffy’s industry-changing standards, continuity in storytelling is everything.
Thanks for stopping by!
