In my recent novella, I created a fictional city & gave a few of the suburbs names to build a fairly simple setting. It's an intentionally vague current/modern setting of ambiguous northern hemisphere location. I'm currently formulating a new work, which I also want to set in a current/modern fictional city, except this will be a supernatural world. I know that the two works deal with different parts of the city - the former is highly restricted to a particular part of town, while it's fairly easy to explain why the latter doesn't deal with that area. So I'm thinking about recycling the fictional city for the new work. My question is: for people who read both, will this be annoying or distracting?
Having thought about it, I doubt it would cause people a problem. To clarify, would it (or would it not) be possible for both stories to co-exist in the same city/universe, or does it require them to be treated as alternate universes. (Personally though, having developed also a detailed city in an 'ambiguous northern hemisphere location' I'm definitely just using it for one series of stories, and would not use it elsewhere. And I do mean 'detailed' - I even made street plans for every 30 years as it grew, to get the right feel for me even though I was only using it in near-modern day. The whole feel of the place is integral with the feel of the stories.)
if it's not a sequel or one of a series set in the same city, i see no good reason to use the same fictional city in two different novels... especially since one is the real world and the other a supernatural one, i'd strongly advise calling the one in the second novel something else and not using the same landscape/details...
In my opinion, mixing these two worlds would be fine and it is possible for them to co-exist but for the matter of whether it will be distracting is more of how the world would be described.
It's mostly laziness on my part because I find naming realistic city suburbs significantly harder than epic-fantasy locations. Thanks for the replies
i was tempted to use the 'L' word... it's good that you can see that it's the main un-motivating factor here... lazy writers don't generally go far...
Well, in two classic John Ford westerns the hero is seen galloping off into one of the "mittens" in Monument Valley at the end. It didn't seem to hurt his career...
