My short stories operate in what I call a “squishy canon.” Sometimes a comparison of two stories about the same characters may reveal apparent contradictions or confusing chronology. This is often unintentional, but it’s unintentionality is intentional. I see my characters, especially the ones who are most prominent right now in my short stories, not as completely filled-in lives but as actors who are constantly playing themselves and alternate versions of themselves. Sometimes a character will experience something supernatural or outrageous and in another story these events will seem like they did not happen or have not had the proper reverberating ramifications. That does not mean that one story or another didn’t happen. It’s not that simple— it’s even simpler than that. All the stories are true and none of them are true.
A character is just a timeless agglomeration of experiences. Bowser kidnaps Princess Peach and Mario has to save her over and over— it doesn’t really matter in what order these abductions took place or what happened in between. The point is the high-jumping adventure. A given Knight of the Round Table is Arthur’s cousin, nephew, friend, or pain in his ass depending on who’s telling the story, and sometimes Arthur’s not even a king (I love Bernard Cornwell’s The Warlord Chronicles trilogy about Arthur).
Conceivably someone could create a fan wiki about my works, a Matkipedia if you will, and have a more frustrating time than with other authors sorting everything out. But there is no need to worry about that once one realizes that the canon is squishy, as I said.
Currently my longer works, as few as they are, do not quite work this way. Some stories work more like James Bond or Conan the Barbarian, where the stories are self-contained and often hard-reset the hero’s circumstances but are not necessarily deliberately contradicting each other (other than unavoidable narrative quagmires like how Bond is 40 years old in both the 1960s and the 1990s). A Good Creature and The Taboo of the Grand Antlers are supposed to have more solid continuity, but I haven’t written their sequels yet so that doesn’t really matter.
Mmm, I love the taste of my own… bellybutton.