The Spectra World origins and overlap

 In middle school, I decided to write a story about a group of six kids, one represented by each color. I was inspired partly by the energy cards in my Pokemon collection. The story began with the yellow/electric girl getting overcharged from swimming with her classmates (because electricity beats water in Pokemon), and the other five kids having to rush her into an empty classroom before she exploded lightning everywhere. 

That was the beginning of the Spectra magic system, which has the same colors and similar associated abilities (red for fire/heat, orange for ground/earth, yellow for electricity/innovation, green for grass/life, blue for water, purple for psychic/communication). I daydreamed about the system for several years before I finally started writing my first Spectra book in 2011.

The Spectra world is a lot of fun to write in because there is a lot of room for variation within those broad categories. I've also loved creating an alternate history for their continent, which is loosely based on the western United States. 

One advantage to staying in the same world for every book is that they can overlap a bit, and cameos from one book to another show up a lot. I'll share some examples from DreamRovers, since the series finale comes out on the thirtieth!

In my very first book, Keita's Wings 1, Keita mentions in passing a valley full of people who can travel through dreams (which expanded into the DreamRovers trilogy several years later). In Keita's Wings 3, she and another character mention legends about One-Shot Walker, a character in DreamRovers, which takes place about two centuries earlier. DreamRovers 3 will go into more about griffins, and even see a carving of the characters of Mira's Griffin. DreamRovers will be a major focus of the second Spectra Crowns book, and in my future book, The Captain's Dowry, the characters visit a city named after a DreamRover character.