I didn’t sit down one day and decide to build a literary universe.
I kept writing stories—and eventually realized they had started talking to each other.
Characters carried pieces of other characters. Places felt strangely familiar. Themes I thought I had finished exploring resurfaced wearing completely different clothes. A story about silence became a story about survival. Survival became reinvention. Reinvention became humor, heartbreak, friendship, family, sex, identity, grief, absurdity, and the wonderfully complicated business of being human.
Somewhere along the way, a collection of manuscripts became something larger.
It became the Dunnamverse.
It Started With Inheritance of Silence
When Inheritance of Silence was published in April 2026, it represented far more to me than the publication of my first novel.
It was the moment something that had existed privately—in drafts, memories, imagination, and countless hours of writing—became public.
At its heart, Inheritance of Silence explores what happens when the things left unspoken become impossible to ignore. It examines identity, relationships, family, vulnerability, and the complicated ways people inherit both love and pain.
But publishing it also taught me something about myself as a writer.
I am fascinated by what people hide.
Not simply secrets, but the distance between who we are, who we believe ourselves to be, and who we allow other people to see.
That fascination would follow me directly into my next published novel.
Then Came House of Windows
Published in September 2026, House of Windows opened another door.
The world was different. The story was different. The atmosphere was different.
But beneath the surface, some of the same questions remained.
What happens behind the version of ourselves we present to everyone else?
What do we see when we finally look through the window?
And what happens when someone looks back?
Moving from Inheritance of Silence to House of Windows helped me recognize something important about my work: I am not particularly interested in writing perfect people.
Perfect people bore me.
I want the complicated ones.
The ones who make terrible decisions for understandable reasons. The ones who laugh at inappropriate moments. The ones carrying wounds nobody else can see. The ones who love imperfectly, fail spectacularly, start over reluctantly, and occasionally discover that the life they were trying so desperately to control has other plans.
Those people became the foundation of what I now call the Dunnamverse.
So, What Exactly Is the Dunnamverse?
The Dunnamverse is not necessarily a traditional fictional universe where every character lives on the same street or eventually appears in someone else’s story.
It is something broader.
It is the growing collection of stories, characters, worlds, and ideas that make up my work as an author.
Some books are directly connected.
Others share emotional DNA.
Some are contemporary. Some wander into fantasy, mystery, Southern Gothic, memoir, romance, or comedy.
And then there are the books that apparently exist because somewhere in my brain a perfectly reasonable thought was followed immediately by:
What if we made this completely ridiculous?
Those books deserve representation too.
Because the Dunnamverse isn't defined by a single genre.
It is defined by a perspective.
From Silence to Sharts
Yes.
We are going there.
Because any discussion of my catalogue that moves gracefully from Inheritance of Silence and House of Windows without eventually acknowledging a novel called I Sharted! would be intellectually dishonest.
And frankly, far less entertaining.
I Sharted! represents another side of my writing—the side that understands sometimes survival looks profound, and sometimes survival means laughing so hard at the absurdity of your own life that you nearly create another problem requiring a change of pants.
Its continuation, I Sharted… Again!, expands that world even further.
The titles may be outrageous, but beneath the comedy is something surprisingly consistent with the rest of my work: people attempting to navigate relationships, expectations, embarrassment, identity, and the spectacular unpredictability of being alive.
Apparently existential crises and gastrointestinal catastrophes can occupy the same literary universe.
Who knew?
Welcome to Highland Avenue
Then there is The House on Highland Avenue.
This story allowed me to move deeper into Southern Gothic territory—where houses remember things, history refuses to stay buried, and the past has an irritating habit of showing up uninvited.
I have always been interested in place.
Not simply where a story happens, but how a place shapes the people living inside it.
A house can be a setting.
It can also be a witness.
Sometimes it can feel almost like a character itself.
The House on Highland Avenue gave me the opportunity to explore that idea through mystery, atmosphere, history, and the particular kind of unease that comes from realizing the past may know considerably more about you than you know about it.
Some Characters Aren't Finished With Us
One of the most exciting things about building a larger body of work is discovering that publication doesn't necessarily mean goodbye.
Some characters refuse to leave.
Theo is one of them.
Readers first encounter Theo and Chase in Inheritance of Silence, but their story exists beyond the boundaries of that novel.
Chasing Pavements reaches backward, exploring Theo's story before the events of Inheritance of Silence.
Theo & Chase: Happily Ever After moves forward.
Together, those stories allow me to explore something I find increasingly fascinating as a novelist:
What happens before the story we think is the story?
And what happens after the final page?
Because "happily ever after" has always sounded suspiciously incomplete to me.
People don't stop becoming complicated because the book ended.
And Then There Is Burn the Map
If the novels allow me to hide pieces of truth inside fictional characters, Burn the Map asks me to do something considerably more terrifying.
Tell the truth without hiding.
My memoir represents another dimension of the Dunnamverse because the stories I create did not emerge from nowhere.
They came from somewhere.
From experiences.
From failures.
From reinvention.
From places I have lived, people I have loved, things I have lost, mistakes I have made, and moments when the road ahead looked nothing like the one I thought I was supposed to follow.
Sometimes the map works.
Sometimes you discover the map was drawn for somebody else.
And sometimes the only reasonable option is to burn the damn thing and start walking.
Friendship, Love, and Possible Upsides
The Dunnamverse continues growing.
One of the stories now taking shape is Friends With Possible Upsides, built around a wonderfully dangerous premise:
Two longtime friends decide dating is exhausting and conclude that becoming friends—with benefits, boundaries, rules, and absolutely no falling in love—is obviously the mature solution.
What could possibly go wrong?
Everything.
Obviously.
But beneath the humor is another question that fits naturally into the world I've been building:
What happens when the relationship you were trying not to have becomes the safest relationship you've ever known?
Once again, different story.
Different characters.
Same fascination with the messy territory between what people say they want and what they actually need.
The Thread Running Through Everything
Looking across these stories, I have realized that my work repeatedly returns to a handful of ideas.
Identity.
Who are we when nobody else gets to define us?
Silence.
What happens when the things we refuse to discuss become louder than anything we could have said?
Reinvention.
How many times are we allowed to become someone new?
Connection.
Why do the people we need most often terrify us the most?
Resilience.
What happens after life completely ignores the plan?
And perhaps most importantly:
Human absurdity.
Because sometimes the most honest response to everything life throws at us is laughter.
Those ideas can live inside literary fiction.
They can live inside fantasy.
They can wander through a Southern Gothic house.
They can appear in a memoir.
They can absolutely survive inside a book called I Sharted!.
That is the Dunnamverse.
I'm Still Building It
Two books have already made their way into the world.
More stories are waiting behind them.
Some are completed. Some are being developed. Some are finding their path toward publication. Others are still evolving as I figure out exactly what they want to become.
And somewhere, undoubtedly, another character is preparing to ruin whatever publishing schedule I thought I had.
I'm learning to accept this.
Because building a body of work isn't simply about accumulating titles.
It is about discovering your voice strongly enough that readers can recognize something familiar even when you take them somewhere completely different.
I want someone to be able to move from Inheritance of Silence to House of Windows, from The House on Highland Avenue to I Sharted!, from Burn the Map to whatever comes next, and still recognize the heartbeat underneath it.
The worlds may change.
The genres may change.
The characters certainly change.
But the questions remain.
Who are we?
What happened to us?
Who do we love?
What are we hiding?
What are we becoming?
And how in the hell did we end up here?
Welcome to the Dunnamverse.
We're just getting started.